Does Google personalised listings affect your ranking?

Posted in Marketing on March 11, 2010 by Paul Boag

Google has added a number of tools that allow users to personalise the search results they see. The question is – does this affect how you approach SEO?

I recently received the following from Peter Bennett:

In response to show 199, you said on some of your specific search results, headscape has been pushed to the top. However since show 199 I have since seen 4 new features at the end of each search result that appear when logged in.

I don’t know how long they have been there but i think they deserve a mention. These features are:

Where You can Promote listings – which will then place the selected website at the top of your personal google results.

You can also ‘demote‘ any websites which you previously Promoted – Which google call Restore

You can also add comments for each individual listings which other users can see.

Finally you can remove – this will totally remove the chosen listing from your future search results.

In my opinion (although I am not sure), if listings get promoted numerous times by different users, maybe this could affect each listings search position in the long term with Google being able to collate each users preferences.

What do you think?

These are exactly the features I was talking about in Show 199 and they have actually been around for a while.

As to whether Google will use these features to inform their rankings, who knows! Even if they do it will be in a minor way. Only the smallest fraction of people searching on Google will use these tools and so Google will not rely too heavily on them.

Bizarrely there has already been extensive debate about whether these features will impact SEO. From my perspective it is a pointless discussion.

Too many website owners spend too much time and money obsessing about Google listings. I am not denying that SEO works. It is possible to manipulate your rankings. However, I would argue that the return on investment is non existence.

I was recently talking to one website owner who ran an ecommerce site. He spent thousands of pounds on trying to improve his placement on Google. He succeeded, but he calculates it made him less than £1000 in extra revenue. In short he made a net loss.

I would argue that the only SEO needed, is work you would do anyway. That includes writing relevant, useful copy and ensuring your website is accessible to the broadest possible audience.

At the end of the day none of us will ever know how Google calculates its listings. However we do know that Google wants to connect its searchers with the best content out there. Lets work on making our content the best and making it accessible. Google will do the rest.

8 tools & techniques to improve your blogging

Posted in Site content on September 25, 2009 by Paul Boag

Blogging is hard. However, as with everything in life it is easier if you have the right tools for the job. Here are 8 which help me.

I have been blogging for over 4 years now. The vast majority of people give up within 3 months. That is because blogging can be hard work. The effort of coming up with subject matter, the sheer mechanics of writing and publishing a post, can all be too much effort.

To be honest I am amazed I still blog. I am lazy, I don’t like hard work. However, I have kept it up because I have discovered a number of tools and techniques which have made the job easier. I thought I would share them with you.

Making idea generation painless

The biggest challenge most bloggers face is picking subjects. The longer you blog the harder it gets. Often you feel you have completely dried up. Fortunately, I have discovered four tools that help me:

1. Find inspiration using Google Reader and Newsstand

I read a hell of a lot. I am subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds. I find them a massive source of inspiration for blog subjects of my own.

When I arrive at work in the morning I open up Google Reader and scan through any stories that have come in over night. If I am interested in a post I send it to Instapaper to read later.

Screenshot of Google Reader

In the evening I repeat the process but this time I an on my iPhone and I use Newsstand. Newsstand is a superb iPhone App that integrates into Google Reader as well as allowing me to tweet about a link, send it to Instapaper or email it to myself.

2. Engage with your community using cotweet

Asking your readers for suggestions is also an excellent way to get inspiration for posts. I have found twitter a superb source of ideas.

However, I have found that time differences can make twitter a challenge when it comes to soliciting suggestions for blog topics. If I only ask for suggestions when I am awake, I will never hear from those who live further afield. Also even if they do spot my tweet, it would be easy for me to miss their responses.

I have got around this problem by using a web application called cotweet. Among other things cotweet allows me to schedule tasks so I can post requests for ideas even when I am asleep. It also allows me to track @replies I receive and ensure I have read everything suggested to me.

Screenshot of cotweet

Obviously there are many other twitter clients, but this is currently my favourite.

3. Collect ideas with Omnifocus

Inspiration can strike anytime but you can be sure of one thing – when you sit down to write a blog post your mind will go blank. That is why it is so important to keep a note of all your ideas.

Basically all you need is a list. This could be produced in notepad or scribbled on a piece of paper. However, for me those ideas live in Omnifocus along with the rest of my life.

Omnifocus Screenshot

The reason I like using Omnifocus is because I can easily add ideas either from my laptop or iPhone. Also it is extremely quick to add those ideas whether they are submitted by users via email or just pop into my head while lying in bed. Finally, I can flesh out those ideas by adding notes within Omnifocus.

4. Discover popular subjects with PostRank

With any luck you will have too many ideas to write about. So how do you narrow down the choice. One way is to look at previous posts and see what content proves popular. However, judging popularity is more than the number of people who read a post. What about those who save the post to delicious or tweet and comment on it? A good article should not just be read, it should encourage engagement.

Fortunately I have just recently discovered a tool that identifies these engaging posts. PostRank looks at all forms of engagement and ranks the popularity of your posts. In a single glance you can see what types of post works and what doesn’t.

Streamlining the production process

Once you have take the pain out of idea generation, the next area for improvement is how you write the posts. From dealing with resizing and uploading images to the risk of losing unsaved work, it is important to have the right processes in place.

5. Post easily with Posterous

On some blogs like this one, you want to add well considered and constructed posts. On others you just want to throw something up as quickly and easily as possible.

I wanted to start a personal blog that was more like the latter of the two options. I wanted to be able to put a thought online in a matter of seconds or grab something I have seen elsewhere and repost it.

The answer was Posterous. Posterous allows me to post directly to my site via email. It also allows me to clip video, text or images from a website using a bookmarklet and then republish my post to twitter, facebook, flickr and more.

Posterous Screenshot

It’s fully customisable and takes absolutely zero time to setup.

6. Write and preview in Marsedit

For the longest time I posted directly to my WordPress blog using the WordPress interface designed by HappyCog. It is intuitive, beautifully designed and did everything I needed.

Wordpress Admin Screenshot

However, more recently I began to get frustrated with my connectivity. Sometimes I wanted to write a post when I was without a connection or my connection to the web was particularly slow. In such situations I prefered a desktop editor. After trying a few I settled on Marsedit.

MarsEdit Screenshot

Marsedit has a couple of things going for it that finally convinced me.

First, I could configure keyboard shortcuts for elements I found myself regularly adding to a post. For example I have a keyboard shortcut setup to automatically paste the current URL in the clipboard to an A tag.

Second, it has an excellent preview facility that allows me to view my post as it will look on the live site.

7. Hassle free image management with Skitch

Imagery has always proved a headache when blogging. Not only do you have to source imagery, it needs resizing and then uploading before you can finally add it to your blog post (once you have copied and pasted the url).

I streamline this process using a screen capture program called Skitch. Skitch allows me to capture anything visible on my desktop, resize it and upload it in a matter of seconds. What is more when it uploads to your web server, it copies the url to your clipboard so you can immediately paste it into your blog. You can even configure it to provide you with a complete IMG tag if you wish.

Since installing Skitch I have found myself adding considerably more images to my blog posts.

8. Focus with isolator

Finally, I am somebody who gets distracted easily. Email, Twitter, IM, they all lure me away from the job in hand – writing a blog post. Personally, I have found this is a particular problem since moving to a mac. Unlike windows it is easy for your screen to become cluttered with open applications. I find this clutter distracting.

Screen capture of my cluttered desktop

What I want is to be able to hide all of this distraction and focus on my writing. The answer is a little application called Isolator.

My desktop with Isolator turned on

Isolator does one thing, it blacks out everything other than the active window. All of your other applications are still running but are hidden. Perfect when trying to write a blog post.

What tools do you use?

So that is my list of techniques and tools to aid you’re blogging. However, I am acutely aware that it is a personal list. For a start it mainly has mac apps.

What tools do you use to help you’re blogging? Share your experiences in the comments below.

173. UX

Posted in Classic shows on July 3, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul talks to Leah Buley from Adaptive Path about user experience design and Marcus provides some advice on warranties and other legal stuff.

Podcast: Download (28.9MB)

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Housekeeping

I just wanted to mention the Summer Camp that Carsonified are running on the 20th and 21st of July in Bath. Its a free ‘get together’ for students or web entrepreneurs looking to discuss web start-ups. Sounds like it will be an interesting gathering and with numbers limited to only 8 places there will be lots of time for addressing individual problems. Check it out.

News

XHTML 2 is dead, long live HTML 5

The big news this week is the W3C’s decision to stop development of XHTML 2 so that more resources can be put into HTML 5. In a statement the W3C said…

Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C’s position regarding the future of HTML.

Although I am no expert, this strikes me as a good decision for two reasons. First, the two ‘flavours’ of HTML was causing confusion. The overlap between the two was significant and they lacked distinctive roles. Second, HTML 5 has gained significant momentum in terms of browser support and community engagement. XHTML 2 on the other hand seemed to be floundering with little movement from the working group. According to Bruce Lawson the decision to drop XHTML will make little difference to most developers. However, one can at least expect to see an acceleration is the adoption of HTML 5 and hopefully greater support by browser manufacturers.

Designers tools

I spotted a twitter by Paul Annett this week that is worth mentioning. It was a link to a collection of Photoshop files containing UI elements for each major browser. The files contain browser windows, dropbox boxes, radio buttons and other user interface elements. This is extremely useful to any web designer mocking up a web page, and saves having to screengrab and isolate each element manually. However this resource is just one of many available on the “Designers Toolbox“. Other resources include…

It also has a load of additional resources for print based designers. It is an impressive site and definitely worth checking out.

Inspirational about us pages

Smashing Magazine have released Best Practices for Effective Design of About Me Pages. The post first caught my attention because “About Us” pages are so often neglected. As the article says…

The “about me”-page is one of the most overlooked pages in development and one of the highest ranked pages on many websites.

I get the feeling most website owners don’t really know what to do with this page. They feel obliged to have it because everybody else does, but fail to really understand its role. Unfortunately I am not sure that this article provides any answers. It focuses on the “About” pages of web designers rather than more general websites, and also shows a lot of examples while providing little in terms of ‘best practice’. That said, it has some stunningly designed “About” pages and so is definitely worth a read. They really are inspiring and will make you long to redesign your own “About” page. Toby Powell's About Me Page

Password Masking

Why is it that as human beings we have a tendency to accept the status quo? Even if we think something is a bad idea we often fail to speak up because it has always been that way and ‘surely there must be a good reason’. One example of this for me is password masking. This is the practice whereby content entered into a password field is blanked out for security reasons. Although I can understand the logic of this it has always struck me as a significant usability and accessibility issue. However, despite that I have never actually challenged the practice. Fortunately Jakob Nielsen has in his post ‘Stop password masking‘. He writes…

Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn’t even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures. Password masking has become common for no reasons other than (a) it’s easy to do, and (b) it was the default in the Web’s early days.

I couldn’t agree more. I believe the security concerns are massively over rated and the usability issues largely ignored. Unsurprisingly Jakob has come under some criticism for his cavalier attitude towards security. Christian Heilmann writes…

As a frequent traveller I am constantly seeing people logging into web sites in hotel lobbies (when they check in for their flight for example and enter their bonus miles account details), in Internet Cafes or when they use their laptop in a public space.

However Jakob addresses this when he writes… Yes, users are sometimes truly at risk of having bystanders spy on their passwords, such as when they’re using an Internet cafe. It’s therefore worth offering them a checkbox to have their passwords masked; for high-risk applications, such as bank accounts, you might even check this box by default. In cases where there’s a tension between security and usability, sometimes security should win. Again I agree with Jakob. Too often password masking is used without thinking. When a user registers for a site that contains little personal information and no financial details, why should they have to enter the password twice simply because they cannot see if they typed it right the first time! Its absurd.

Interview: Leah Buley on UX design

Paul: OK So I have Leah Buley today from Adaptive Path. Great to have you on the show Leah, thanks for agreeing to come on.

Leah: Thanks Paul I am excited to be here.

Paul: So I heard you this year at South by South West(SXSW) talking about UX teams of one, which I have to say, was the highlight of my SXSW. I am not just sucking up it really was the most enjoyable one

Leah: (laughs) You might just be sucking up but I will take it. I will take it all in.

Paul:Yeah just take it , just go with the flow. So the reason it was so erm inspiring I think from my point of view was that the company we run Headscape was for a long time a distributed company and we then came together and started having an office, but I don’t think we have really got our heads around the advantages of all being in a office together. So all of your talking about brainstorming and stuff like that was hugely, kind of blindly obvious but revolutionary at the same time. It was a light bulb moment for me. So thank you very much for that.

Leah: My pleasure. Paul. So I thought lets share some of the stuff that you covered at SXSW with the listeners of Boagworld because I know there is a lot of people out there that em maybe are open to a new approach to the way they are handling design and User interface, usability and all that kind of thing. So lets kick off by talking about and perhaps defining design as you see it, because you obviously don’t see design purely as the aesthetics of a site, and as you were talking you obviously had a much bigger role in mind for what you would consider a designer so tell us a little about that.

Leah: yeah, well actually the first caveat I should make is that I am not a trained designer,

Paul: OK

Leah: I have an information science background and have done years of work as a developer so you should take everything I say with a grain of salt. But I think what is interesting from my perspective is that a lot of people in our field are not actually trained designers but they are doing design work.

Paul: yes

Leah: So recognising that and understanding essentially there is a process to design and how anybody can do it is an important thing and for me the way that I would define design is basically anybody who is taking a known problem and consciously reframing it, often with the use of constraints. So in my mind design is much more a process as whereby something new emerges as opposed to outcome that somebody produces. The designer or the role of the designer, anyone who does the design is to shepherd that process basically.

Paul: hmmm Yes This is kind of a complete tangent really but it was something that came up in your talk and I was fascinated by it and wanted to know a little more about it. You talking in your presentation about Forrester CX model ? Which I had not come across that description of it. I had heard of kind of a similar approach used in sales as the sales approach, but could you explain what that model is and why you brought it up in your presentation.

Leah: Sure yes , it’s a report that Forrestor’s put out called the customer experience journey it is written by a guy named Bruce Temkin who actually has a excellent blog called experience matters where he writes a lot about user experience, from the kind of business person’s perspective so check it out if you haven’t already. The interesting thing is that Bruce has written a lot about experience based differentiation for companies, which is basically just the idea that you have a better user experience you therefore have a better product and evidently his writing about his experience based definition has been one of there most popular reports, which sort of suggests that executives recognise customer experience as really critical to their success and that many of them are many of them are offering a sub-par experience right now. So then in this customer experience journey Bruce essentially explains how an organisation can build a strong customer experience practise and the report has a lot of recommendations about a corporate culture and employee training and how to deal with trade offs, but in particular there’s a sort of a model that describes five steps for the evolution of customer experience in an organisation it’s great, it’s like it’s beautifully simple but it is also deceptively simple at the same time.

Paul: yeah

Leah: The five steps are, er the first step is interested basically so at that point the customers organisation is aware that user experience or customer experience is something they should be thinking about, but they have not really done anything about it yet. The second step they get invested, which basically means they hire somebody to do some work, this tends to be someone that is at a pretty low level. At the third step they become committed, which means they have someone who is an executive who has responsibility for the outcome of that user experience work. At the fourth step they become engaged at a very high level sort of a organisation’s initiative level user experience is a priority and then the fifth step the nirvana of customer experience is that they become, it becomes so embedded into the fabric of the organisation that it is kind of like the first principles to everything we do it does not have to be explicitly called out like a project team to make the website more user friendly or a project to make our products less funky to hold or whatever.

Paul: hmmm

Leah: So emm that’s the model so it fascinates me and kinda frustrates me a little about it is that it makes it seem so linear like you can just put one foot in front of the other and eventually over time you will reach step 5. I think there are different stages that are tricky for different reasons, the leap from having lower level user experience people to executive user experience people can be awkward for organisations for a lot of reasons and what I have seen just on my personal experience is that companies have, it is not like they start out with one user experience person and then it grows and grows and grows and then ends up they have a team what happens is they have kinda epics in the approach to user experience so sometimes it’s big and they will hire big staff and in lean times or some executive goes away the staff will shrink and then some other champion will come along and he will want to bring it back. I have been in situations where I am a user experience team of one or even when I am on a team of professionals and you learn that there was a user experience practise several years ago and then it went away and it is like discovering cave paintings or hill dwellings or something and you realise there have been other people that have come before you and you are like why did they go away what happened? So that leads to like a really core belief I have about user experience practise which is that it is not built by delivering killer projects and sort of building on top of killer projects one by one but it is built through relationships and patience and mutual respect over time and that it is about really erm sort of investing the time to actually get to know the people who need to work with you as a user experience professional investing the time to understand their concerns and their objectives and to take those things seriously and to work with them as a designer to facilitate them achieving their goals as well as you achieving your goals. I know that is touchy feely but I think it is in my personal experience that that works well, has worked well for me.

Paul: I think it is very true as well I mean I think there will be a lot of people listening to this interview that maybe er you know feel like they are stuck on one of those stages and can’t progress things and can’t move forward. Whether they are responsible for their website within the organisation, whether they are a internal web designer or something else. And it is very easy to become kind of bitter and angry and become the no person within the organisation that is constantly you know fighting against the system but actually building the relationships is the best way to move things forward and you know I do a lot of work in large higher education and public sector organisations that have huge amounts of bureaucracy and it is ultimately the relationship and carrying people along with you that enables you to do things and move things forward.

Leah: Yeah. I absolutely agree and I think it is particularly interesting talking to you as someone who has worked in big bureaucracies because they are the hardest places to do it I think, it is just the bureaucracy itself can add an extra layer of frustration that is on top of the initial frustration that I think we often feel as user experience people just trying to communicate why this new area is important. So it is very easy to get embittered, yeah if I think of my own personal experience I have seen that too and the trick is to make yourself feel a little less alone and the challenge for that is if you are user experience team of one, and you do not have a big group you don’t have colleagues who have the same experience as you, you kind of have to find a way to find a way to make friends with the non user experience people that you work with and turn them into colleagues and turn them into allies and that you do through soft skills much more than design skills on some level. I think the dirty secret of design is that it is fifty percent soft skills and then the rest is design and if you can learn to listen well to people and ask more questions than you answer and I don’t know be a fun lunch date I think those are the sort of things that will serve you very well in this line of business.

Paul: Yeah, totally agree it is really interesting to hear you say that because yes, really good really good. Let’s move on before I start ranting about that particular subject. Ermhmm lets talk about Adaptive Path and the process to design that you guys take. Obviously you guys produce some superb work and I am really interested in the little glimpse you gave us in your presentation at South by of that process and how you go about doing things so maybe you could try and summarise that for the listener.

Leah: Yes of course. Well in a nutshell it is a mess it is just a total mess and I am serious about that it is a messy process and that’s part of the magic er but actually, when a little secret of Adaptive Path is and it’s design process is we do not have a set design process unlike some other companies in this field who you know often have like the discovery and then the research and whatever phases. We don’t really have a set process we what we kind of do is custom design each project to match the problem that the customers have but even so I think must projects tend to involve at least three things in some kind of configuration to one another and those three things would be 1. Trying to understand the business environment in which the project has to succeed 2. Trying to understand the user’s context in which the product is actually going to be used in the end and the third part and the thing I talked a lot about at SXSW the design exploration and when I say exploration I use that word very deliberately because we try to treat it er as a process that has to widen before it can get narrow, we try to sort of approach design as actually as a erm exploring a new field essentially but in terms of those three prongs understanding the business problem tends to be really just a lot of honestly trying to ask the hard questions of our customers in a way that will help them to be open to the answers. One of the kind of philosophies of us t Adaptive Path is that we encourage our clients to reframe or rethink everything and so that is a really great foundation then coming back to them and saying in terms of the design approach we are going to take we are going to really explore wide, really broadly and present to you some ideas that maybe push further than you would be thinking of pushing right now but we do that so we can potentially adjust those ideas for the things that are the right size for the constraints and the objectives you have right now. So the design exploration, that particular process we tend to . It is pretty basic we tend to start out and force ourselves to actually spend some dedicated time coming up with lots of different ideas and obviously that is informed by user research which is the second item that I mentioned. We try and start by going into the field to observe users and in context and get as much information as we possibly can about not just what they want to with the product but also the circumstances of their lives at the point at which they are going to use the products because one of the things we find that people are always more distracted and busy and multitasking when asking them than they think they are. Understanding the nature of that helps us to say OK now we are going to sit down and explore the designs for this product what are the constraints that we know our user has and our business has and then the constraints become just a useful device in sort of the process of design exploration hmm in that you can say well if we know that the person who is going to be using this product will also have four other applications open on their desk at the same time or fourteen other applications or forty how do we design something that is optimised as for minimal attention or for is optimised for quick hit interaction so then that little nugget becomes a thing to design with. So lets design a screen that is the ideal starting point for somebody that has ten seconds to do anything but the trick is that you can’t just let yourself stop with those known constraints, you can’t just say we have designed the screen for ten second interaction so we are done with it. If we are truly delivering on our promise that we are helping our clients rethink everything we need to explore beyond that we need to explore more widely beyond that so then we use a lot of other devices that kind of help us to brainstorm in really different ways. This is kind of a funny example but I will bring it up because it illustrates nicely how different kinds of tools help you brainstorm in different ways. We did a project not long ago where we wanted to rethink mobile devices and how we work with them in the world and so in order to force ourselves to rethink that we actually did an exercise where we went out into the world with different kinds of physical objects that were not shaped like mobile phones. They were shaped like pencils and magnifying glasses and wire whisks.

Paul: OK Leah and pretended like those things were mobile phones and imagined what we would possibly want to do with something like that and it is just great because these simple devices would help you to re.. to just forget your assumptions, we have some many assumptions about what a thing has to be and the trick is as a good designer is to force yourself to erm break those assumptions at least for a little bit of times so you can allow your creative process to suggest new ideas to you. Paul. It is really interesting it is fascinating to hear that you are doing that kind of stuff but I am sitting here thinking there are going to be people listening to this show that their design process may consist of you know understanding the business objectives, understanding the users needs and putting a bit of time into that and then they launch Photoshop or fireworks and they are sitting there and they do the design.

Leah: Yes

Paul: and your coming along and talking about going out with whisks and you are talking about coming up with loads of ideas and they are just thinking that is so divorced from the way they are currently working that is this kind of quite hard to imagine that transition.

Leah: Well I don’t think it has to be and that’s what’s interesting and that’s what I tried to talk about a little at SXSW which is that you may not be on an adventure to re-envision the mobile experience but that there are some pretty basic techniques that we can employ even when we are sitting at our desks, even when we are in front of our computers to help us think more broadly. So some of things I have talked about they are really basic they are almost like hacks you can think of them as design hacks if you wanted to 1. Is essentially stealing ideas stealing inspiration from the visuals, sort of visual sources that you encounter everyday so one idea that I really believe very strongly in is keeping an inspiration library

Paul: Yes Leah So if you are using the web and you see something that is an interesting design to you take a screenshot of it and put in some place where you stores those things and then when it is time to start designing flip through that thing flip through your inspiration library and see if there is anything that kind of inspires you in a way that you wouldn’t expect. If that is not on the level of taking a wire whisk out into the world to redefine a phone but if your designing a kind of news portal and you happen to see a guided wizard that, you know screenshot, that has some real interesting kind of treatment of help information and then you realise oh call out boxes could really work in a real interesting way in my news portal that’s sort of the level of forcing yourself to think in a different way or more broad way I also think that just playing with word association is actually so kind of beneficial and talking about what do we want this thing to feel like, or what if it felt like this plus that and then actually just doing a quick sketch of what that would actually mean or look like. The interesting thing is that I have worked with classically trained designers who would probably most certainly call me a design hack but who would say there is one kind of optimal way to design a webpage or design a sort of software that essentially takes the top priority into consideration then the second kind of priority and then the third priority and then lay out the page accordingly so people notice the top thing first and then the second and third thing. But I think the way that metaphor kind of works on us as human beings is actually much more interesting and it can create it can make the experience of using a product or a website feel like something really pungent that is not just actually about information processing it is about a user experience. Ermhmm at the IA summit Cindy Chastain a Information Architect based out of New York city did a presentation on using themes in design and the way she described these themes was basically that you sort of create a little story or create several little stories for what we design could be about and that depending on the story you take the way that you actually design that thing will be really really different. The example she gave is that she did a website for a woman who wrote all of these soap operas in the United States that a soap opera that has been popular for decades and decades she was the primary writer on it and the website is for fans of this soap opera to go and see all of these you see all of these pre-recorded old recordings of the soap opera but in figuring out ermm what experience they wanted to provide for this product they created three different themes and one theme was like the story of a writer and which was basically about the woman who worked the soap opera and the other theme was a love affair with a soap opera which is basically about the fan experience and the third was like forty decades of television or four decades of television which was basically about the TV creation process. Depending on which theme or story you were to go with would create a very different design. In fact they did pick one design that ended up being very specific and tangible and allowed them to design for a really meaningful metaphorical experience for the people who used it but you have to imagine as a end user going into a website that tells you about the story of a writer is going to be very different from a website that tells you, that immerses you in the feeling of being a soap opera fan and I think when I and so I love that example because it shows really nicely how just choosing metaphors and choosing inspiration and choosing examples can encourage a whole world of brainstorming in various possible directions.

Paul: I recently warmed very much to this principle of generating a large number of ideas and the idea of stepping away from the computer, and you have talked about having sheets which forced you to do like six wireframes, like different mock-ups on a single page and you talked about overcoming that thing of running out of steam, like you know I have done two or three designs now what do I do, type of thing. So all of that was really interesting and the idea of including other people in that process so you are not working in isolation and I went back and we did this. We sat down and got er a developer in the room and I got a project manager, I got lots of different people in and we did this and we had a really productive day and got loads done and then it occurred to me that I got five people sitting in a room for a day and that is five man days worth of work.

Leah: Ahhhh

Paul: And you suddenly go crap that is out of our budget that’s a lot. You know it suddenly meant I started going into the practical mentality is a cost effective way of doing things and should we be working like this. I am interested in you thoughts on that.

Leah: Yeah Well it is interesting I hear this concern a lot from people and I am fascinated to hear that you did it and that you did it for a day which I want to hear more details about that later on but I think that the thing is it does not have to take a day and I think that the concern that it will be a vast investment of time for everybody isn’t isn’t .. it is a real concern but I think it is something that can be managed. I have actually had some pretty productive workshops that are an hour long or two hours long and that’s if you round five people for you know an hour or two it is obviously still five or ten hours it is not a week of man hours necessarily. So I think you actually need to be very careful about scheduling sessions that are fixed in time and have clear goals and end points, and just to constrain it a little bit. I actually personally believe that constraining time is another benefit in the brainstorming process. Particularly when you get people that are not necessarily used to being usually involved in designing it can be very scary to jump right in developing ideas and hard actually so I think what happens in a group like that, is people like to think about the ideas for a while and then maybe one thing and get warmed up have a cookie or muffin or something and they feel like they are more casual and they will start sketching, you do not need that time that is just road clearing what you can do is you can give them structured activities that will get them to put there ideas on paper immediately and that will have the same sort of net effect. When we do workshops with folks we do these sort of template based workshops and we give them literally five minutes or seven minutes to sort of sketch out all of their ideas and maybe we will do a couple of rounds of that but the beautiful part is when you have five minutes you don’t even have enough time to think what it is you want to do you just start drawing..

Paul: Yeah

Leah: and it sort of it circumvents the throat clearing that happens in the sort of longer meetings erm and templates I think are really helpful actually in those workshops particularly because people are funny you know we really like to accomplish tasks, if you put something in front of us kinda well defined and has a clear end point I think our impulse is to just do it and kind of get it over with. So if you give someone a template it helps them to sort of say like draw an idea for say what you think should happen in the system explain what the important aspects of that idea are and tell me another product in the world that it is kind of like erm and then you tell them they have five minutes to do it you will be amazed how quickly people can crank out a lot of ideas and then you do a couple of rounds of that and it’s erm in a structure like that that you can really get a lot out in a hour or two hours.

Paul: I mean yeah you have hit the nail on the head there we made, you know the first time we did this we made a lot of mistakes and there was a lot of kind of oh I don’t know whether I am kind of comfortable with this, there was a lot of preamble kind of thing and also we just got tired out. You know there is only so long that you can do something like that. Now admittedly along side that we were doing things like, it was kind of a kick off meeting as well and we were kind of introducing the project to some of the people in the room and that kind of thing but to be honest putting it all together in one big meeting was too much we would have been better of splitting that over a period of time, there were reasons why we had to do it that way because one of the guys isn’t local and he was down but it did kind of get me thinking about this you know the amount of time but like you say if you have structured activities and you set time limits on it then actually that is beneficial yeah

Leah: But also I think actually it is probably important to acknowledge the point that you make that there is time commitment in working this way and it is not like, it is not like you can squeeze it in and still do everything in the way that have already been doing it, it’s there is an actual time commitment to doing it this way. We often at Adaptive Path can do week long design sprints where we essentially we do a lot of the brainstorming activities that we have been talking about in this conversation in the first part of the week and will actually produce wireframes by the end of the week and it is really aggressive and it’s incredibly productive and brings us a lot of work but you cannot do anything else during that week there is just no way. So you sometimes you have to make time move quickly.

Paul: Another thing is ultimately you get the time you are investing back in things like having a developer sit in the room is going to avoid problems later down the line where you know …

Leah: yeah

Paul: where he suddenly turns round and says hang on a minute you have come up with this is the design and we can’t implement that or there is something suggested at these early stages but because the project manager is not there it gets lost in the system and all the rest of it. So I think you know it just feels like a lot up front is the best way of describing it.

Leah: Yeah and I think it is important, you know if you are a team of one in an organisation or where you do not have a lot of support as the user experience and where they may not have a lot of erm comfort, your colleagues may not have a lot of experience or comfort or familiarity with design it is important to go just sort of take baby steps with them with this stuff. I think that you rather than coming in and you are there for a little while and you realise this isn’t quiet working lets change everything and have a two day off site and get the executives to support all this. That might be a little ambitious but erm what might be a little more feasible is to talk to the team and say I feel like there are some ideas we all have that er that maybe it would just be good to get out so that we can actually consider them directly and talk about what’s appropriate or not for the product, could be schedule a hour and half workshop I will structure it don’t worry you do not need to do anything just come with yourself and a pencil in your hand and I will give you cookies and it will be fun and that’s kind of like a starting point to get people ending up engaged in the activity and what I find is when you give people a little bit of a taste of it and they see it can be so productive they become much more enthusiastic about participating and making time for it later on. So particularly if anyone who is listening to this conversation is a team of one or is even like a freelancer with a organisation that they do not have an established relationship with I would say start out with baby steps and structure a workshop in a way that will actually help the participants to see the effects of it pretty quickly

Paul: So we have talked a lot about kind of generating a lot of ideas and you know certainly when we gave this a go we ended up with loads of ideas, erm So I think we need to end this interview by kind of going well now what? You have got this big pile of ideas how do you kind of refine them down into what you are going to actually use.

Leah: Yes, that is always the hardest part of the process actually and not at the same time I think what will happen is there will be a couple of ideas that will be really exciting and everyone will sort of know it. I do not know if that correlates with your experience but the trick is even though some ideas seem like wooh that is pretty cool or wow that would be kind of awesome if we built that it is a question of is that appropriate for the business needs that are driving the product, appropriate for the users needs and for that it ends up a lot of kind of compromise but in order to know where you make sense to compromise or where it doesn’t make sense to compromise it can be really critical to have a well articulated statement of what experience you are trying to produce.

Paul: yes

Leah: We use design principles at Adaptive Path which I know a lot of folks in the field use but for us we try to potentially create five to seven short succinct statements of what the experience of the product should be and doing that helps us to look at all those ideas and say, like this is the coolest most web 2.0 interface I ever saw but it does not support our design principle so it is probably out of the door. The key to the design principles are that they are not, it is not a statement of what the functionality of there system is, it is not like sort of brand attributes it really needs to be something that implicitly invokes what the experience is going to be like so like TiVo has some great design principles early on in the development of their product they created some statements of what they wanted their product to be and you can even when you use TiVo now you can really see a reflection of that. Their design principles were “it’s entertainment stupid”, “it’s TV stupid”, “it’s video dammit”, everything is smooth and gentle, no modality or deep hierarchy, respect the viewers privacy. These are all things they are not quite features and functionality although some of them allude to it, they are not quite brand statements although there is certainly a lot of brand personality expressed in them. They sort of describe what the experience of using TiVo should feel like and it kind so works well in that respect.

Paul: hmmm, excellent that’s been so useful I could carry in talking for hours about this particular subject, but that is certainly a brilliant introduction and I would encourage people to check out the slides that you produced for that presentation which are up on slide share if you search for UX team of one you will find them no doubt. Thank you very much for coming on the show Leah and hopefully we will get you on again in the future to talk about other related issues and we can start this whole conversation all over again.

Leah: That sounds great, thank you very much Paul, I really enjoyed it.

Paul: Good to talk to you, Bye

Leah: Take care, Bye now.

Listeners feedback: Warranties

Got this question through from Andy Wickes:

I’m really interested in how you draw up a warranty regarding a website, and what you cover and for how long.

We are constantly plagued with clients expecting us to continue to support their site months after completion even though they refuse to pay a support fee.

There seems to be an expectation that a site should never develop a problem, never break when new browsers are released, and never cause issues even though we all know that sometimes issues arise from hosts that we end up attending to on their behalf.

I agree with your that the most vital thing is a firm agreement between agency and client at the outset as to exactly what each party expects from the other, but I am keen to learn what you expect to find in a ‘standard’ warrarnty agreement, what is covered, what length of time is suitable as part of the build fee.

Slightly ‘how long is a piece of string’ I grant you, but something I know my team and friend find a constantly challenging topic!

We include the following warranty as part of all our contracts:

The Contractor warrants that all the Deliverables shall collectively provide the functionality specified in the Statement of Work. For a period of twelve (12) months from the date of acceptance by the Client of the final Deliverable the Contractor shall promptly remedy at the Contractor’s own cost any non-compliance of the Deliverables with the specification set out in the Statement of Work or such non performance of the Site.

So, in English, that means that we will fix any genuine bugs for free on a site that we have developed within twelve months of the go-live date. There are two key issues that can crop up relating to warranties.

Interpretation

Taking my last sentence as an example – what does ‘genuine bugs’ mean? If it’s a CMS job, then some kind of functionality defect such as a form not submitting properly would definitely fit that description. But, as Andy mentions, what about rendering bugs in new browsers? The legalese states that we will fix bugs “within the specification of the Statement of Work”. New browsers aren’t included in that.

That old adage ‘common sense’ tends to come to the forefront in situations like this. If the ‘fix’ will take a tiny amount of time and, at that point, you are negotiating another much larger project with the same client then giving a little slack probably wouldn’t hurt your relationship. However, you always have to make sure that the client knows that you are offering something that is outside of the warranty otherwise you could end up creating an expectation that it will happen every time.

Another recent example where we decided it was in our interest to fix a number of sites free of charge – that were all outside their warranty – was when early versions of our CMS became vulnerable to a security risk.

Though we could have insisted that the work we carried out was chargeable, we decided that having a bunch of broken sites was potentially more damaging to our reputation than worrying about chasing clients for the small cost of fixing the sites.

Expectation

The second issue relates to what a client expects of a warranty with an agency. There is a view, I believe, that a lot of clients see a warranty as a support agreement.

We have often had calls or emails that relate to CMS usage, for example, “I can’t remember how to input a news story on to the site, can you remind me”. Again, in this type of situation, common sense should rule but if a client is continually asking support related queries or is outside of the warranty period then explain that you can either provide an estimate for the work they are requesting or that they may wish to consider setting up a support agreement where they can call-off your time more easily.

This can be occasionally met with a frosty reception especially if you are no longer working with that particular client but, you are not being unreasonable in any way. You are simply charging for your time like everyone else in business. To use an analogy, no-one likes paying to have their car serviced but equally, we don’t expect the garage to do it for free.

Summary

As with most things contract related, make sure that you discuss what your warranty means with your new client before you start work. Concentrate on the fact that it is not a support agreement and discuss the potential need for a support agreement.

Also mention that websites, like most things, do break sometimes and often this is long after a warranty period has run out.

169. Type

Posted in Classic shows on June 10, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this weeks show: Paul talks about the power of story telling and shares some tips for “getting in the zone” and Mark Boulton joins us to talk about web typography.

Podcast: Download (24.8MB)

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Housekeeping: Jobs and Projects

Whether you are looking for a freelancer to build your latest web project or a permanent addition to your web team, the Boagworld forum is now the place to go.

We have added a new jobs category which lists web design projects and jobs free of charge. So, whether you are looking to post a job or pick up some work you should take a few minutes to check it out. Right now there are jobs for…

A web project manager
A joomla expert
ASP.net developers
PHP developers
And much more.

News

Coding like its 1999

This week Cameron Moll has posted “Coding like it’s 1999“. The reason for this witty title is his decision to return to using HTML 4 and pixel font sizes, both of which were best practice in 1999.

The post is essentially a justification for these two decisions and he puts forward a very convincing argument for both. He credits his decision to move back to HTML 4 to Dave Shea who recently wrote a compelling argument to drop XHTML. Dave writes…

Six years ago, many of us thought XHTML would be the future of the web and we’d be living in an XML world by now. But in the intervening time it’s become fairly apparent to myself and others that XHTML2 really isn’t going anywhere, at least not in the realm that we care about…. I’m not ready to start working through the contortions needed to make my sites work with an HTML5 DOCTYPE yet, which leaves me with the most recent implemented version of the language…. [U]ntil I get a better sense that HTML5 has arrived, 4.01 will do me just fine for the next four or five years.

As for the decision to move back to pixel based typography, Cameron writes…

However, recent versions of every major browser — Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and yes, Internet Explorer — now default to page zooming instead of text scaling… What does all this mean? It means px can again be considered a viable value for font-size. It means the difference between setting text with absolute units or setting text with relative units is negligible for users. For you and me, however, the the difference is substantial. The burden of calculating relative units throughout a CSS document is replaced by the convenience of absolute units — 14px is 14px anywhere in the document, independent of parent elements whose font-size may differ.

Although at Headscape we still work with XHTML, we have moved back to pixel base typography and I suspect will do the same with HTML. I do not think it will be long before most web designers follow suit.

The power of words

Problogger has published a post that demonstrates the importance of our words. It shows how the words we pick can have a real effect on how users act. Word your copy carefully and you could substantially increase conversion.

Interestingly the post does not demonstrate this through example of good website copy. Instead it looks at the language used by successful waiters. The article takes three phrases often used by waiters and explains why they are so powerful. The phrases are…

“Our chef recommends”
“Everyone else has ordered… and they love it”
“So gentlemen, is everything delicious?”

From these three phrases he raises the following points…

Invoking the power of a higher authority will influence decisions - For example using a testimonial from an influential figure.
People believe in safety in numbers - “If others like something then surely I will too”. For example highlight your most popular products or articles.
Positive wording generates a positive feeling – For example “Thanks for subscribing to my email feed! I hope you find every post as exciting as the one that made you subscribe”.

It is an excellent article and there is a lot more detail than I have covered here – make sure you check it out.

10 tips for creating a more usable web

The Web Designers Depot has published “10 Tips to Create a More Usable Web“. Its not exactly the most original post and we have seen similar posts from Smashing Magazine in the past. That said, it is still a worth while read.

The problem is that it is so easy to forget best practice when it comes to web design. There is just so much to take into account as we design a website that we can easily overlook things. Articles like this may not necessarily teach us anything new, but they do bring to the fore best practice that may have been pushed out by more recent issues such as WCAG 2 or web typography. We can never be reminded enough of the principles of usability.

This particular list includes…

Creating active navigation
Clickable labels & buttons
Linking your logo
Increasing the hit area on a link
Adding focus to form fields
Providing a useful 404 page
Using language to create a casual environment
Applying line height for readability
Utilizing white space to group elements
Being accessible

As with all good list posts, each point is accompanied by a brief explanation and some nice examples. Check it out.

Four quick tools

I conclude today with a quick round up of various tools that have been released this week. Its a bit of an eclectic mix but they are all worthy of note…

Google Page Speed – Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
EntityCode – HTML entities are HTML code that is used to display special characters such as the £ sign. However, remembering them all can be tricky. EntityCode is a useful reference that lists some of the most commonly used HTML entities in a very swish AJAX driven format.
Google Web Elements – Google Web Elements allow you to easily add your favorite Google products onto your own website. Widgets include calendar, conversations, custom search, maps, news, presentations, spreadsheets and Youtube news. All of these widgets existed previously but have now been brought together on a single site.
Adobe BrowserLab – Adobe BrowserLab is a browser compatibility service that provides designers screenshots of their pages on leading browsers. There has been a lot of excitement around this one, but I was not overly impressed. Sure the interface is nice and Adobe are a big name. However, the service only offers screengrabs (not interactive sites) and only for a limited number of browsers. In my opinion there are better services out there such as Litmus’ Alkaline.

Interview: Mark Boulton on web typography

Paul: So, the next in our series of interviews from the Future of Web Design is with Mark Boulton. Hello, Mark.

Mark: Hello there.

Paul: So… we interviewed you on boagworld, didn’t we, about… quite a while ago.

Mark: It was a while now, January?

Paul: Yeah

Mark: Something like that.

Paul: Something like that, yeah.

Marcus: What, that long ago?

Paul: Well, in internet terms, that’s forever.

Mark: That’s forty years ago.

Paul: So, at the time, you were just embarking on this odyssey of doing a redesign with Drupal, or you were part-way through it. And we were talking about this very unusual approach of ‘Hey’, you know, we normally discourage people, don’t we, from doing any kind of, don’t show your design to a group and you were showing it to thousands of people.

Mark: Yes, yes.

Paul: And you talked about how great it was going to be and there was this slight fear and trepidation in your voice at various times. How’s it gone?

Mark: It’s gone really well.

Paul: Has it?

Mark: It has. It’s gone really well. It’s been terrifying on a daily basis. Posting comments for… you know, registered users on drupal.org are about 400-500 thousand.

Paul: Right.

Mark: A fairly active, passionate community; a lost of these people have invested time, money and have businesses riding on Drupal. So, however, the vast majority are really in favour of what we’re doing.

Paul: So what, how did it work in practice? You know, were you uploading designs to a blog and just saying: ‘Hey, have your say’ or was it more structured than that?

Mark: It was more structured than that; it wasn’t initially, I mean we’ve learned some painful lessons along the way. But it was a very distributed approach, so we’d have a Twitter group, we have, sorry a Twitter account, we’d have a flickr group, YouTube groups, our own blogs – mine and Leisa Reichelt’s.

Paul: Right.

Mark: We’d have drupal.org, which is the main kind of Drupal page, but we’d also have groups.drupal.org where you can create your own little groups and we’d have a group there.

Paul: OK.

Mark: The view is that, so if we just posted things to Drupal, if we just spoke to the Drupal audience, we’d get a very slanted feedback on what we were doing.

Paul: Of course.

Mark: So, the idea was that we would touch on all sectors of the, kind of all bits of the audience. And then we’d, we were working weekly iterations on a 12-week schedule.

Paul: Right.

Mark: Which was killer.

Paul: Yeah.

Mark: We would not do that again and we would release material, whatever that would be; mostly it was HTML prototypes, fairly lo-fi, and we’d release them on a Thursday and then we’d sit on our hands

Paul: And watch.

Mark: And watch, yeah, with trepidation.

Marcus: Dealing with hundreds of thousands of comments.

Paul: How did you deal with that?

Mark: Yeah, we, we…

Marcus: Ignore them!

Mark: At first, I mean, there’d be the odd occasion where you’d get flamed and things could get personal and nasty and the&helllip; of course, the natural, human reaction would be to get in there and defend yourself and, but we, after a couple of times of trying that, which didn’t work, we didn’t, we really had to walk away from the computer and…

Paul: Yeah, I think that…s a good lesson for anybody running a community or interacting with people.

Mark: Absolutely, I mean the first lot, you know, if you post something up to a community, your first day’s worth of comments are setting the scene and then the following days from that trends will start to emerge &endash; repeated themes &endash; and that’s what we were watching for. So, we’d spend maybe four days, through till the Monday, just watching, you know, over the weekend, which was quite nice because we could do other&emdash;have a life…

Paul: Which is always good.

Mark: Yeah. And then we’d go back over the comments on the Monday and try and establish some themes that we agreed with and we put forward into the next iteration.

Paul: Right.

Mark: But it’s probably worth saying at this point that it was not a design by demo… it was not a, kind of, a democratic process.

Paul: No.

Mark: Because you just end up with mediocrity, I mean, kind of a little bit of a dissing WordPress here, but what WordPress are doing with the voting.

Paul: Right.

Mark: That’s not really our approach. Our approach was… we had a clear design vision.

Paul: Right.

Mark: And we pretty much stuck to that, but it was the way that you presented the material and gathered the feedback, that’s kind of steering that vision.

Paul: Yeah, so did you learn lessons about presenting the material and how to do that?

Mark: Yeah, we’re still doing that, we’re still on a kind of weekly basis.

Paul: Because that’s always the big thing isn’t it? You know, you can’t just take a design, show it to people and say: “What do you think?”

Mark: No, just go: “Here you go” No, which we did early on and it was a disaster.

Paul: Yeah, I can imagine.

Mark: Yeah, it was. It was like: “What do you think of this? I’ve got some ideas for the logotype.” “It’s rubbish!” You know, hundreds of comments.

Marcus: And they all start arguing with each other, no doubt?

Mark: Yeah, and it was… so, you have to put something in place to ask for specific feedback; that’s where we got to. So, it was, if you’re posting up an iteration which involved heave change to the masthead design, we’d steer it like: “What are your thoughts on the navigation? You know, do you think this works, do you think that works?” And wherever possible, we’d validate our design direction with testing and research anyway.

Paul: OK.

Mark: But, recently we’ve been starting doing videos.

Paul: Right. Which is quicker, I’m guessing.

Mark: Kind of, a little, er… yeah, it is. It’s been good.

Paul: I guess, I mean, the videos, did you, so you’re talking over the top of the videos and…

Mark: No, no. I mean, it’s literally we’d… so, I’d come up to London and I’d work with Leisa in the British Museum, or whatever, and after a morning, we’d have a Flip and I’d just video the two of us talking about stuff.

Paul: See, I think that’s really good, because it makes people think twice before criticising, because there are real people behind them.

Mark: They see you as a real person. Absolutely.

Paul: So, there’s probably a benefit to that.

Mark: I think there is, I think… a lot of people hated it. And a lot of people hate the…

Paul: Yeah, but a lot of people hate everything.

Mark: Yeah [All laugh] A lot of people hated the distributed approach because they couldn’t keep track of everything, but i’s not…

Paul: Which I can kind of understand.

Mark: It’s not really their job to keep track of it, they can if they want, they know where everything is and, sorry if it’s difficult, but that’s the way it is. So, this time around we set up a bunch of Yahoo pipes, and things like that to aggregate everything from all over the place and just pop it in a WordPress blog.

Paul: Right.

Mark: That’s the approach that we’re doing for redesigning the back-end, and that’s working pretty well, because people have a framework in which to feedback, they’re not going hunting for everything all over the place.

Paul: I’m guessing that people are even more opinionated about the back-end than the front-end?

Mark: Oh, massively! A lot of people don’t really care about the drupal.org website, I mean it’s looked terrible for years and it’s not done them any harm, so a lot of people are saying like: “Well, why bother?” But Drupal’s almost, kind of, on a tipping point, I think; there’s a lot of big commercial companies using it and it’s important, but the back-end is been developed by developers for developers.

Paul: Ooh, painful.

Mark: Yeah, so to go in there and say that the user experience is broken, which is what we have said, has been interesting.

Paul: Right.

Marcus: Because they know it backwards, I guess.

Mark: Well, they know it backwards and they’re comfortable with it. THe thing with the Drupal, as a system is that you download it and you install it and then you hit this brick wall really hard and then you have to spend six months of a pretty steep learning curve to even get a rudimentary site online. And that’s, we’re trying to flatten the curve. But a lot of developers don’t really understand the need for it.

Paul: That’s developers for you!

Mark: That’s fine. [All laugh] I’m fine with that.

Paul: So, I mean, this is quite an unusual approach that you’ve taken here and it makes a lot of sense because, you know, Open Source software, it has to be an open and collaborative process and all the rest of it. Do you, would you ever do this again and if so, would you only do it with Open Source stuff, or do you think there’s a value in doing it with non-Open Source stuff?

Mark: I think there’s a value doing this with communities, where communities have a vested interest, either financially or with time spent in the community to take that community on board and redesign it for them; I think it’s pretty disrespectful. So, I think it would work for communities, you know, the social side of the web is ever increasing and I think this approach would work for the majority of that, but it takes a certain type of thick-skinned designer to take it on the chin, because it goes completely contrary to the way that designers are schooled and the way that we practice our craft every day, is that we’re the problem solvers with the years of experience and we’re the experts and here’s our solution, it doesn’t work in this sense.

Marcus: Can I ask a sales-y question?

Mark: Yeah.

Marcus: Because I don’t know how you won this work. Was that the differentiation that gave you the… this is what we’re proposing to do?

Mark: Er, yeah, I believe so, yeah. It was the kind of the loose, almost by the seat of our pants agile approach and the fact that we were not ingrained in a process and we were quite happy and willing to break it apart and completely.

Marcus: Because it’s going to take a long time, isn’t, and most clients want it, you know, can you do it in a week?

Mark: Oh yeah, the drupal.org redesign isn’t due to go live for another few months and our involvement was four months.

Marcus: Sure.

Paul: Right.

Mark: So, yeah, it takes a long time, it’s a lot of effort but, from a sales point of view, we’ve now taken on more of a, so we use to work pretty strict waterfall, like a lot of agencies did, and now we don’t, we work, I wouldn’t say we were agile because agile can be as restrictive as waterfall, just a different name. But we work a very iterative design process now and are finding that our clients are loving it because they’re getting involved right away, there’s no time wasting on functional specifications and weeks and weeks and weeks of scoping; it’s getting in and solving the problem, and from a financial and a business point of view, it’s a very scalable model, so you have x number of days at a certain price on a sprint and you can expand and contract that process according to scope and budget. It does require quite a leap of faith by the client, to say: “what, you mean you’re not giving me a fixed price?”

Paul: Yeah, that’s the hard sell.

Mark: I’m like: “No” And that is hard but I’ve found that a lot of clients you sit down and you talk them through it; they can see the advantages.

Paul: Because we’re not at that point, are we?

Marcus: Er, not with new clients. Old, you know, existing clients will accept it because they trust you, but it’s always this… I mean, I don’t know, would I… say, if I owned a business and I was going to hire someone I didn’t know, even if I could see that they’d done a lot of good work etc. etc. it would be like: “Ooh, I don’t know if I could do that” You know.

Paul: Difficult.

Mark: So, a lot, so, in those instances and there have been a few, then phasing comes into it, you know and let’s see how a few sprints go and if you like how it’s going at this price, let’s expand it out and…

Paul: Yeah.

Marcus: Interesting stuff.

Mark: So, yeah, it’s interesting.

Paul: So, you like to do things different, don’t you [all laugh] you know.

Mark: Wherever possible.

Paul: Yeah, and talking of which, you’ve just given an interesting talk about web typography that’s got a bit of a different slant on the whole subject of web typography. Talk us through a little bit, you know, give us a potted version of your talk.

Mark: A potted version is 20-25 minutes. So, this week there’s been a lot of discussion online, based on Comic Sans.

Paul: Right.

Marcus: Right.

Mark: Comic Sans is evil, apparently.

Paul: Yes.

Mark: I don’t think it is evil.

Paul: OK.

Mark: I think it’s the victim of being used in the wrong context for years and years. And I think that, so there’s also been a lot of talk about font embedding, you know people are crying out for it, it’s why sIFR exists, and all of that. The technicalities of how it’s going to work with browsers and manufacturers and the font foundries aside, is it actually a good idea?

Paul: OK. [all laugh]

Mark: And I mean that from the point that the majority, the vast majority of typefaces have been designed for a particular reason and they are primarily designed for print usage first and screen usage doesn’t get a look in beyond the preview of the screen font. Now, Georgia and Verdana and a bunch of the Microsoft ‘c’ fonts have been designed the other way around. They’ve been designed for screen first and print second. Now, we’re constrained by those typefaces and that’s actually a good thing.

Paul: Because it makes sure you’re using typefaces designed for the purpose.

Mark: It makes sure you’re using the right tool for the job. Font embeddign could be opening the floodgates to a whole world of pain, I think, in terms of type, and it’s not the designers that will be at fault, it will be, you know, the people who are going to suffer are the users of the sites.

Paul: So, is there a… I mean, surely that shouldn’t preclude font embedding, but perhaps there is an opportunity here, I don’t know, to limit font embedding to fonts that are enabled for the web, and open up a whole new business.

Mark: Could be, exactly, could be. I haven’t really thought beyond my twitchiness of this being a good idea. I haven’t really, I would like to think: “I don’t think this is good” but, I think the crux of my point is moving beyond font embedding, is to actually, the reason why fonts in other tools, which has led to the usage of Comic Sans is because the tools that people can use don’t allow them to make good design decisions.

Paul: Right. While some constraints do.

Mark: So, with some constraints and some steering, can help, so why not as designers, why don’t we get our heads together and think about how we can, kind of, scaffold that experience for people. How can we make, because every one’s a designer now.

Paul: Yes, for better or worse.

Marcus: Even me.

Paul: Yes, Anna wants to talk to you about your design for your band website, we won’t dwell on that now, in the middle of an interview.

Mark: Everybody’s a designer and everybody’s, you know, someone who uses Comic Sans because they think it’s fun and quirky is right in doing so, but what they’re not considering is their audience, and the context that it’s used and all of that. So, that’s pretty much the, my talk in 3 minutes.

Paul: The crux of the argument. I mean you did in your talk go on and discuss the role of typography more generally, which I thought was quite interesting as well, share a few of your thoughts about that.

Mark: About how I see typography as a craft and that kind of thing?

Paul: Yeah, and how it fits into the whole process and the relationship between design and content and that kind of thing.

Mark: So, it was split down into 4 really. This talk was quite good, it was quite therapeutic, in a way, because it made me really answer a lot of tough, ask a lot of tough questions of myself as to what do I think typography is, on the web, to me, what is it personally. With that is type as kind of structure, which, you know, is a lot of information architecture, really, that to me that is typography; it is type as language, how typography is married with content and how the, we’re in a world on the web where designers are designing systems for content to go into.

Paul: Yeah, template-based design.

Mark: Exactly, and they’re divorced from the content, you know, divorced from the language, in that sense, typography’s quite hard to do, good typography anyway; then there was, what else was there? Type as process, so the Jesse James Garrett’s levels of user experience, with the idea that typography in that instance is relegated to the surface plane, which is the visual plane, you know, it’s: “make this look nice” typography; to me that isn’t typography.

Paul: So, what is typography?

Mark: Typography goes deeper, typography goes deeper than how something looks, it is how information is structured, it is how information in understood, it is how words and language is conveyed.

Paul: Can you give some examples of that, because that’s quite, you know, it sounds very good, but it’s quite hard to get your head around maybe.

Mark: Yeah, OK, so it’s, what’s that quote: “You cannot not communicate”

Paul: Right.

Mark: No matter what you do, you’re saying something to somebody, so your choice of typeface says something about the words that you’re writing.

Paul: Yes, it does.

Mark: If, as a designer, you don’t know what those words are, how can you communicate the message?

Paul: Yeah, I mean it goes back to Comic Sans.

Mark: To Comic Sans, exactly, and that’s one of the difficulties, there’s been a lot of talk about art direction on the web, and I see that as the biggest barrier to art direction is that designers are divorced from the content.

Paul: I mean, this is almost quite depressing.

Mark: Yes, really I…

Paul: It’s not really happening.

Mark: Sleepless nights!

Paul: It’s not happy idea, because, I mean, fundamentally, that isn’t going to change, we’re not going to get into a situation, you know, because rightly want to be able to change and update and alter content on their own website and that makes a lot of sense, which means even if you have the content up-front, it may change further down the line. I guess maybe the tone doesn’t.

Marcus: I was going to say you’re looking at tone here.

Mark: The tone, you’re looking at branding and you’re looking at designers being involved right at the offset.

Marcus: And I think that is better now than it was even two years ago.

Mark: Oh, it is, yeah, it is, yeah, absolutely.

Marcus: I mean, we are looking now at involving copywriters, we are pulling copywriters, we’re talking to our clients about employing copywriters through us, that’s new.

Paul: And from the start of the process as well.

Mark: Yes, right. So, we’re doing the same, we’re looking at employing content strategists rather than actually writers, more from a branding perspective, because that kind of stuff, you know, doesn’t really change, depending on the words that you, the values of the client are still communicated and it’s aligning, it’s the designer’s job to align the typography, not just the font, but the way the information is structured and working with a copywriter to make sure the typeface matches the tone of voice. and all of that is a package. So, that’s what I mean about the surface plane; typography shouldn’t be relegated to: “choose a typeface and away you go”

Marcus: Yeah, I mean, that’s the big thing isn’t it, that’s for me, what I’ve taken from this is your, is the font, the typeface has to match the message, basically.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely.

Marcus: It has to fit with the branding.

Paul: OK, good stuff. I mean, that’s yeah, you’re doing some really interesting stuff. I love the way you’re pushing, kind of, what is the conceived wisdom in lots of areas, which I don’t suppose you think you’re doing, you just stumble into these things, obviously.

Mark: Yeah, I did. Getting together this talk was one thing, this talk did not pan out the way I thought it would and to question the very notion of font embedding is quite a…

Paul: Because our whole culture really is built around the idea of choice, more choice is better, but actually that’s not always the case.

Mark: Yep, so I mentioned that in my talk.

Paul: Oh, did you?

Mark: About the jam stall, have you seen this?

Paul: Yeah, yeah. That classic, tell that story, that’s a good one.

Mark: So, there’s a couple of psychologists, a few years ago did a study where they had a jam stall and they had 26 varieties of jam and nobody bought any and then they reduced the jam varieties down to six and sales increased by 10 and it’s just the choice.

Paul: You could almost be overwhelmed.

Mark: Well, yeah.

Paul: Even as a designer you can, you can open up Photoshop, look down that font list and go “crap!”

Mark: So, this is where I showed a screengrab of TinyMCE and that, out of the bag, has 82 choices for a user, so WYSIWYG isn’t great in those terms, but there’s something within there which is, as designers and the design community could build on, which is this notion of styles and how you can use the styles to create a cascade, through your typography, through your design, so we’d limit the end-user’s choices, but not in a bad way, constraints are good.

Paul: No, I mean, the way we now work, because we use our own content management system with our own adapted WYSIWYG editor it, we’ve taken a third party’s and messed it around, that basically we only allow, by default, obviosuly sometimes clients disagree, but we only allow them to mark up the content semantically, so they’re not at any stage picking fonts, because that’s the designer’s job, they’re just describing what the content is, whether it’s a heading or a sub-heading or whatever else, which, you know, obviously, you know, ensures that design style goes through, but also makes it much easier to use for the user as well, they’re not having, you know, a plethora of options and buttons to deal with, so…

Mark: But it goes beyond the web, I think, and this is what I was thinking as I was going through this, the reason why Comic Sans is all over the place is because Word makes it easy for you to make those bad design decisions, so it goes beyond that and content management systems in 10-20 year’s time could look nothing like what we’ve got now and if we don’t think very carefully about this notion of choice, then we could be in a real mess.

Paul: Yeah. Well, certainly we’ll be in a real mess anyway.

Mark: But, you know, a lot of people would push back on that and say: “What’s your problem? That’s fine. Mess is fine.” I don’t agree.

Paul: A little bit of mess is alright. No, I see where you’re coming from and, you know, I think there is a lot of value in that. I think I would personally still like to see font embedding, but I wouldn’t object to that being limited. I mean, one of the big problems to font embedding, as I understand it, and I’m not as knowledgeable on it as you, but is a licensing problem. So, if we have a new generation, I just look at the font industry, you know, the people that produce fonts and go: “Look, you’re missing a trick here, you know, you could create a whole new range of fonts, designed for screen, licensed for the web, and there we go.” So, if that’s what we end up with, I mean, that’s great.

Mark: That would be great, you know, if we got the calibre of typefaces like the new Microsoft ‘c’ fonts, and we got, you know, a library of 40 of those to use, 50, that would be awesome. If we ended up with a way of embedding up to, you know, Bitstream’s library’s what 28000 fonts, you can choose what you like, I don’t see that as…

Paul: Not so good.

Mark: Not a good thing.

Paul: I mean, even as somebody, I mean, I went to art college and, you know, obviously I had to study typography as part of that, I still feel overwhelmed. When I, I know some people absolutely love, you know, going to some of these foundries with all these different fonts and they spend hours picking through and it’s like buying shoes for, no I won’t say women because that will be sexist but, you know it’s almost like an addiction. For me, it just overwhelms me.

Mark: Yeah, no, I’m the same, I’m never, and this is one of the great things about the web is the restrictions in the typeface you can use because it makes you think more about typography beyond the font choice.

Paul: Yeah, which is only a tiny part of typography.

Mark: Exactly, and it makes you really push typography, and people are still pushing Georgia and Verdana and there’re still pushing it and they’re still making great looking sites. Font embedding can only confuse all that, unless it’s done in a pretty structured way, but like you say, the licensing is one big hurdle to get over.

Paul: Well, that was probably the most eclectic interview we’ve ever done, covering lot’s of random subjects,but very good, thank you for coming on the show, Mark.

Mark: No, thank you very much for having me.

Thanks goes to Simon Douglas for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback

Storytelling

Mark from Taunton writes:

I run a rather dull corporate website for a company who builds and sells pre-fabricated timber houses. It is a competitive market and although a lot of users visit hardly anybody contacts us for a quote. To be honest, I have lost any enthusiasm for the site. Can you help!?

I could answer this question by focusing on the importance of repeat traffic on conversion rates. We could look at generating repeat traffic through the use of articles, newsletters and offers. However, we have covered nurturing repeat traffic before. Instead I want to look at the power of story telling as a way to engage with users.

Users considering purchasing high value products and services have a number of generic questions…

Can I work with these people?
Are they experts at what they produce?
Can I trust them?
Is the product or service of sufficient quality?

In short any corporate website that sells a product or service should be about the product and the people. One way of focusing on these two things is to tell the story of the product/service. In Mark’s case this would progress through the process of designing, manufacturing and building a pre-fabricated timber house. At each stage you would introduce key people involved in the process – the account manager who deals with the customer, the architect, the project manager, the builder etc. The story could even be the experience of one particular customer and so end with a testimonial from that customer. These people could be interviewed on video or profiled in the copy. Either way it gives the user the chance to see the expertise and personalities behind the business. It builds trust and demonstrates the quality of your product and people.

Finally, the story based approach helps the user imagine themselves going through the process and therefore helps them picture working with your organization.

Getting into the zone

Paul wrote a question aimed at Elliott Jay Stocks in our forum that I would like to respond to as well. Paul wrote…

As a designer, I feel times when I am very creative, others when I know an hour infront of Photoshop will be useless. So, fellow designers how do you make yourself get into the zone. I imagine this is even harder for freelancers, or maybe easier actually, as you can pick and choose hours to work.

Like most people I find it very hard to artificially force myself to be ‘in the zone’. However, I have learn’t over the years that there are some things you can do that increase the chance of it happening. These are…

Change your environment – If inspiration is hard to come by I often find that a change of scenery can be a massive stimulus. Go and work in a different room, a local coffee shop or even in the middle of a field. Anything to kick start your creative juices. In my younger days I was even known to work under my desk or on top of a wardrobe.
Use a different approach – Another similar approach to changing your environment is to change the way you are tackling the task. If you are trying to design a site in Photoshop move to pen and paper. Try designing just in black and white or reduce your design to simple boxes. Often approaching a problem from a different angle sparks inspiration.
Create distractions - Everybody always advices that you remove distractions to ‘get into the zone’. However, personally I find this leaves me staring at a blank page until my eyes bleed. An opposite approach that has worked for me is to actually add distraction. For example I will set an alarm for 10 minutes. After that 10 minutes I force myself to take a 2 minute break. These short spurts of creativity seem to work for me and the breaks are a frustration that make me hungry to get back to work.
Take a break – Proper breaks are important too. Sometimes you need to walk away from a problem before the solution comes to you. It has taken me a long time to accept that some of my best work on a problem is done when I am not consciously thinking about it. If I get stuck I find that watching some TV or going for a walk is a very effective way of putting me ‘in the zone’ when I return.
Go with the flow – Finally, it is important that when inspiration strikes you run with it until it has been drained dried. Even if you find yourself in the zone at the end of the business day, do not stop working. Cancel meetings if you need to but make sure you keep going. This is the time when you need to remove distractions and just go with the flow.

166. Boldly Go

Posted in Classic shows on May 20, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul shares 10 ways to put your content in front of more people, Emily reviews Bubble Timer and we discuss the role of gender in design.

Podcast: Download (23.4MB)

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Housekeeping: Facebook

Good news everybody! Boagworld now has a Facebook page. I know, its exciting isn’t it. Contain your enthusiasm, you are making a scene.

Seriously though, I wanted to let you all know because I am aware I spend most of my life refusing friends requests on Facebook. I made a decision early on to keep Facebook for personal friends rather than a promotional tool for Boagworld. I always hate refusing people and should have setup a page or group ages ago. Somehow I never got around to it.

Anyway, the Boagworld Facebook page now exists so make sure you take a minute to join it.

News

Google supports RDFa and Microformats

The big news of the week is Google’s announcement that they will now be supporting RDFa and Microformats.

Both RDFa and Microformats are methods of marking up information on a webpage in such a way that it can be understood by a machine. Google now understands four such types of embedded data. These are…

When Google discovers this type of data on your website it will enhance your search engine results to include the data.

An example Google search result including a review

Yahoo has offered support for embedded data for some time. However, Google’s market share gives a considerable boost to the Microformats community and is of massive interest to those interested in SEO.

However, before rushing to check if your embedded data appears in Google’s results, you should be warned that it almost certainly will not. According to Jeremy Keith Google has only implemented this feature on a small subset of sites. However, he goes on to say:

The list of approved sites will increase over time so if you’re already publishing structured contact and review information, let Google know about it.

Nevertheless this finally gives a solid business case to implement embedded data, which I have been advocating for some time.

Launching a new blog

I have often talked about the importance of running your own blog. I have explained how having a blog is an opportunity to share your expertise and is important in winning new business or advancing your career. However, in all that time I have not once given any advice about launching a blog. This is a definite omission on my part.

Of course one approach is to soft launch your blog. This gives you the opportunity to build a backlog of posts and find your voice. However, there are other occasions when you need to make a splash when you launch. If that is you I recommend reading 10 Ways to Launch a New Blog with a ‘Bang’.

This Web Designer Depot post provides some great advice that costs virtually nothing:

Prepare amazing content in advance
Run a viral twitter campaign
Guest post on other blogs
Interact with your user base

However, it also makes some suggestions for organisational blogs that have a budget for launch. These include:

Give away prizes
Host a launch party
Hold a contest

Of course many of these suggestions are just as applicable to those looking to breath new life into an existing blog. So if you have a blog, read this post.

The creative process

There is two posts that have emerged this week that offer two very different perspectives on the creative process. Both are worth reading if you are a designer.

The first is written by Keith Robinson over at Blue Flavor and is entitled Don’t Lose That Creative Thinking. At its most basic level this post is a rant. However, as rants go it is extremely thought provoking and inspiring.

In this post Keith rails against constraints and convention. He argues we are too often constrained by technology writing “Let’s let technolgoy work for us! Not the other way around” and that too often we choose to blindly accept conversational wisdom instead of thinking for ourselves. He writes:

What ever happened to creativity and opinionated thinking in design? Has science and data removed the artistic? What about trusting your instinct as a designer and making the way for future innovation. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to sit back and watch people do the same thing over and over and then turn around and question someone who’s making a creative stand.

It is a definite call to arms and although somewhat extreme at time you cannot help but be inspired to create more and compromise less.

Talking of inspiration I also want to mention The Evolution of a Website Design by Mike Kus. The post tracks the evolution of the StackOverflow website that Mike has been designing over the last few days.

Stackoverflow website

The reason I mention this post is that it fascinating to see the process of another designer. What makes this even more interesting is the fact that Mike is relatively new to web design coming as he does from a print background. Seeing his process really brings home some of the points raised by Keith in his post. Mike seems unconstrained by technical considerations and web conventions. As a result the work he produces is both original and beautifully crafted.

Launch a business not a side project

We end today with another post from the guys at Carsonified. This one is from Ryan Carson and is titled “Launch A Business, Not a Side Project“. In the post Ryan shares his own experiences of launching web applications and provides a wake up call to those of us who have focused so heavily on getting an app out of the door that we have forgotten it requires business mechanisms to suppport it.

Notice that I refer to “us”. That is because most of what is written in this post mirrors our own experiences of launching Getsignoff. When we were building Getsignoff all we could think about was getting it launched. However, as Ryan points out in his post, this is only the beginning of the story. Even though I have warned clients against it many times before, I had the “build it and they will come” mentality.

Ryan focuses on 4 key areas that are often forgotten by web developers in the scramble to get an app live. These are:

Making time for marketing
Assigning recource to kick ass customer support
Spending money on advertising
Using A/B testing

As Ryan writes:

The majority of apps were built by small web design firms or freelancers who bought into the dream without really understanding how much time it takes to make an app succeed.

This is so true. It certainly was for us. Although we have great plans for Getsignoff, it has been a painful journey and you can bet that any future development will be backed by the business processes to make it a success.

Feature: 10 ways to put your content in front of more people

What is more important – driving traffic to your site or encouraging as many people as possible to see your content? Believe it or not, they are not one in the same thing. In this week’s feature Paul looks at 10 ways you can make sure your content is seen by as many people as possible.

Read ’10 ways to put content in front of more people’

Audible recommendation

This week I would like to recommend The Long Tail by Chris Anderson on Audible.com. The Long Tail is a superb book that I would recommend to anybody running a website especially if it is an ecommerce site. The book examines how the web has changed the value of information and commodities. It looks at the huge opportunities available to reach ever more niche markets and make money from the long tail.

Best of all if you sign up with Audible you can get this book totally free. Simply go to www.audiblepodcast.com/boagworld and claim your free credit.

If you want to listen to it, Audible has it! With over 60,000 titles and virtually every genre, you’ll find what you’re looking for. Get a free audiobook and 14-day trial today by signing up at www.audiblepodcast.com/boagworld.

Listeners feedback:

Bubble Timer Review

Hi Paul, hi Marcus and hello to the Boagworld listeners, my name is Emily and I am here to submit a review of a time-tracking application called Bubbletimer.

First of all I have to make a little apology for the sound in the background. I work from home and it turns out I live on quite a noisy street which I have to say I don’t really notice until I try and make a recording and then all sorts of weird sounds in the background, so please excuse the background noise.

So I’m submitting a review of Bubbletimer in response to show number 158 where Paul talks about the reality of home working which is also a blog post on the Boagworld website and it was actually the blog post which really inspired me to want to make a response, in particular a comment by XX who asked about how Paul tracks his time. I immediately wanted to make a response, which I did in the comments but I thought I’d share it here to share this fantastic time-tracking web application that I use. It’s called Bubbletimer and basically what it does is it tracks time in 15 minute increments by activity and then by day and it produces reports for your chosen time period, say a week.

There is a 15 minute time chime reminder which reminds you to track your time and forces you to consider what you’re doing and whether that is what you’re meant to be doing or whether that’s the most productive thing you could be doing.

There is also a mobile web interface which can be quite nice if you’ve got an iPhone, you can be online all the time. There are also multi-user capabilities in that you can share reports with others so if you’re working in a team you can see how much progress everyone else is making.

What it doesn’t do is; it doesn’t convert time to time slips, it doesn’t integrate with an invoicing application and it doesn’t recognise when you’re inactive or when you’ve changed tasks, as I know some time tracking applications can do.

So really it’s for self-employed people, freelancers or those working on fixed-price projects who want to track their progress on that project, or anyone who needs help motivating themselves in getting things done. It’s not for employees because of it not having time-sheets or integrating into a invoicing scheme, I’d say it’s not good if you’re self-employed or a freelancer working on an hourly basis.

What’s great about this application is that you can track your non-billable time and for me that’s been a real lifesaver. I am one half of a small web design partnership and I do lots of accounting, quoting, emailing and lots of tasks that are not specifically billable, or billable tasks that I’ve already quoted a set fee for, so with this I can measure the actual time spent against what I’ve quoted.

Of course you can also use it to track how much time you actually spend on ‘Social Networking’ every day, you know, see how long you actually spend on Twitter or commenting on blog posts. Another example of one of the tasks I’ve been tracking with it is my bookkeeping and it’s really been useful for me to see how much time I’ve spent on that and whether I ought to think about hiring a bookkeeper part-time because I can look at my reports from a week or over a month and see how much time I’ve actually spent doing that.

It’s a really simple, easy-to-use interface, there’s some really nice details in there like the ‘scribbles’ when you complete a 15 minute bubble of time are different, so there’s kind of a texture to it there. It’s also growing to accommodate popular feature requests as requested on the Get Satisfaction forum, which is really responsive if you have any problems, or if you have feature requests, I’ve seen new feature be introduced since I’ve been using it.

Now I shouldn’t end without telling you that it isn’t free, there is a cost, but it’s just $20 a year and I think it is well worth it for someone who wants to get things done. As I said my name is Emily and my Twitter name is @gradualist you can find out more about me there, thanks for listening!

Do you have a tool that you swear by? Maybe a web design tool, or just a tool that keeps you organized? If so send us an audio review we can put on the show.

The role of gender in web design

We have received an interesting audio question from Dennis. He asks whether any of our clients have expressed a concern over the gender of our designers. He cites his own experience where a female client said his designs were too ‘practical’ and not ‘fun enough’ because he was a man.

First off, I have to say that your client sounds rather sexist to me! The implication that men cannot design a ‘fun’ site is absurd.

That said, gender does play a part in a designers style. For example, women are much better able to perceive colour than men and so tend to make better use of colour. However, gender is just one of many factors that shapes a designers style. Other factors include:

Cultural background
Design schooling
Personality
Design leaning (e.g. illustration, typography, photography)

The list could go on. The point is that what we perceive as masculine or feminine design, is not solely produced by the associated gender. There is overlap and a blurring of lines.

Where I think things get more tricky is when a male designer is asked to design for a female audience (or vice versa). This is more challenging because good design involves empathy with the user. Unsurprisingly it is harder for a man to put himself in the position of a woman. However, it is probably no more difficult than for a young person to visualize the needs of an older user. It is the ability to do this that separates a good designer from an exceptional one. The key is thorough research into the target audience and an ability to steer clear of preconceptions and stereotypes.

162. Social Media (Yuck!)

Posted in Classic shows on April 21, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul interviews Mel Kirk about using social media for marketing. Marcus, explains why you need a thick skin as a web designer and we give you the chance to interview Elliot Jay Stocks.

Podcast: Download (35.1MB)

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Housekeeping

In last week’s show I promised exciting things to come in the boagworld forum, and this week we begin to deliver on that promise.

Listening to the interviews with top web designers on this podcast is interesting, but wouldn’t it be even better if you could be the one asking the questions? What would you ask one of Britain’s most talented young web designers? Would you ask him about Photoshop techniques or about what makes his career a success? Well, now you have the chance.

Elliot Jay Stocks used to be the Senior Designer at Carsonified before going freelance. His clients now include WordPress, Blue Flavor and FreeAgent Central. He produces some truly stunning work and is considered one of the best web designers around.

He has kindly agreed to take questions from the boagworld community over the coming week. So starting on Wednesday 22nd April you can visit the Boagworld forum and ask him whatever you want. This is an amazing opportunity to really understand the working practices of another designer and discover the secret of his success. It is a rare opportunity to see how somebody else approaches the challenges of building an effective website.

Ask Elliot a question now.

News

Website management: you can’t automate everything

Sometimes I think I have experienced some kind of mind meld with Gerry McGovern. I continually find myself nodding furiously when I read his stuff. This is certainly true of his post recent post “Website management: you can’t automate everything“.

Gerry is writing about something I have mentioned on this show many times before – content management systems are not enough to solve your content problems. Gerry writes…

The school of content management brought us such developments as portals, customization, personalization, and distributed publishing. These management-free, technology-driven solutions have led to public websites and intranets teeming with poor quality, badly organized, out-of-date content.

What do you get when you personalize crap content? Personalized crap content. What do you get when you distribute publishing rights to people who canâ€™t write, donâ€™t care about what they write, think metadata is a country bordering Outer Mongolia, and will never, ever review or remove what they publish? You get the website you deserve.

He goes on to say…

Technology is important, even critical, but we still need quality people to manage websites if we want those websites to deliver value to the organization.

Amen to that!

IE6 Update: Pure evil!

While Gerry McGovern rants about content management, I want to do the same about a terrible website from people that should know better.

IE6Update has good intentions but its approach is at best misguided and at worse evil and manipulative.

The aim of IE6Update is to encourage IE6 users to update to a modern browser. I think we can all agree with that objective. IE6 lacks the functionality of modern browsers and its rendering engine struggles to handle modern websites. What is more, its a pain in the ass for developers.

That said, the end does not justify the means. IE6Update provides a Javascript ‘snippet’ that can be added to any website. This code displays a notice to IE6 users telling them that their browser is out of date and they should upgrade. So far so good. I consider that an acceptable thing to do presuming IE6 users can still access your content.

My problem lies in the way they do this. Instead of displaying a styled message consistent with the rest of the site, they choose to disguise the message as an official IE notification bar. This tricks the user into believing they are being asked to perform the upgrade by Microsoft.

This is the kind of approach you normally associate with malware or dodgy advertising. It is not the kind of thing you expect to come out of the web design community.

I spend half my life trying to explain to clients why they should treat users with respect. Something like this undermines that work by legitimising deception. If you want to tell IE6 users to upgrade then that is fine. However explain the benefits of upgrading, don’t trick them into doing it!

Where Have All the Flexible Designs Gone?

Craig Buckler asks an interesting question over at Sitepoint – Where Have All the Flexible Designs Gone?

Flexible sites are those which adapt to fill the whole browser window no matter how it is resized. As Craig points out, traditionally these have been considered good practice because they work at any resolution and the user is put in control of sizing.

However as Craig goes on to say, there has been a decline in flexible sites recently, with an increasing number of designers adopting a fixed width approach. Craig cites a number of reasons for this including…

Their consistency with design mock-ups
The pixel perfect control they provide
The additional cost of building flexible sites

Although these are valid reasons for fixed width design, they are nothing new. Flexible sites have been around for years. Why then are they dying out now?

There are two reasons why I generally no longer recommend flexible sites to clients…

Support for page zooming – All modern browsers now support page zooming. This removes the needs for sites to accommodate increased text sizes. If the user wants the site to fill the screen they simply zoom in. What is more a flexible site can cause horizontal scrolling when zoomed so creating a usability problem. This is especially in IE7.

Graded browser support – Because I deliver different experiences to different browsers using different stylesheets it is no longer necessary to have a “one design suits all mentality.” I can deliver one stylesheet to capable browsers and another to small screen devices.

Although there are still reasons to use Flexible design, the argument is no longer as convincing as once it was. The return on investment often no longer justifies it.

Help your site convert

Smashing Magazine have released two posts that provide excellent advice on encouraging users to complete a call to action.

The first, imaginatively titled Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert, covers subjects such as…

Subliminal Suggestion
Preventing Choice Paralysis
Try before you buy
The Gutenberg rule

The followup post 7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert goes on to cover…

A/B Testing
Scannable Feature Lists
Streamline The Sign-Up Process

Both articles offer lots more tips than those listed here, providing explanations and examples for each.

It is easy to believe only ecommerce sites need to convert. However, that is not true. All sites need some form of call to action, so these two posts should be required reading for all website owners and designers.

Interview: Mel Kirk social media for marketing

Paul: So I’m very excited today to have joining me, Mel Kirk. Hello Mel, how are you?

Mel: I’m very good thank you. How are you?

Paul: Very good. It’s good to have you on the show. Feels like I’ve had so much to do with you and yet we never had you on the show and that is a sin and I am truly sorry.

Mel: No problem. We have known each other for years now I think so…

Paul: We have, haven’t we. Let’s start with a little bit of an introduction for those people out there who maybe don’t know you as well as myself. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and where you come from and what kind of stuff you’re involved with, that kind of thing?

Mel: Yeah, absolutely. So I moved into web space about four or five years ago when I started work at Carsonified, which was Carson Systems at the time and what was arranging their events, Future of Web Apps and Future of Web Design. And from there I heavily became involved in promoting the apps that they were building and then eventually moved on to communities manager before I finally left, which was about eighteen months ago. And then after that joined Aardman Animations, Wallace and Gromit…

Paul: Aah, yes

Mel: Everyone recognizes it when you say Wallace and Gromit and my main project there was to work on a video platform called Formations. Which was a joint venture with Channel 4 which was in effect, it’s like a YouTube for animation…

Paul: OK

Mel: …which was brand new when I joined so my work was really around building a community around the new site there and getting that to launch, which we did. And then most recently I joined WhiteLabelDating.com as marketing manager of, so I see some very interesting sites.

Paul: Yes, that’s an interesting career move. I didn’t know about the last one. That’s fascinating. Ooh, we’ll have to come onto that one later.

Mel: Absolutely. Um so yeah, now I’m kind of responsible for researching our target audiences and their behaviors and reviewing user perspectives and brand building, all of that kind of stuff.

Paul: So is it fair to say you describe yourself as a marketeer?

Mel: Absolutely, yeah.

Paul: So, that’s good because we haven’t had a marketeer on the show before and I’ve gotta say I think that there area lot of web designers out there that are a little bit snobbish when it comes to marketing and so I think it’s a good subject for us to cover on the show and talk about, a little bit about online marketing and how to approach that kind of thing, so it’s good to have you here.

Mel: Thank you.

Paul: Right, where to begin. Um, OK let’s start at the beginning. Let’s say that somebody has got a really good product or company that they’re very proud of, they’re very excited about but they need to generate some kind of awareness online of who they are or what they do. Where do they start? Where do they begin that process?

Mel: I think for me the main thing before you implement any kind of strategy is research. So knowing your market inside out. Taking the time to work out how those people communicate and where are those discussions taking place. And then becoming a part of that conversation but doing it genuinely with something to offer. So don’t be afraid to say that you’re bringing something new to the table and that you’re obviously there to promote what you have to offer but in return being able to go into forums for example and answer questions for people, to be seen to have an opinion on current topics so that gradually you build yourself up to be seen as an expert in your field so that people have confidence in the service that you’re offering or the product that you’re trying to sell to them.

Paul: Sure. So it’s about establishing yourself as an expert more than it is pimping your product or service.

Mel: Absolutely, and I think nowadays people are used to being marketed to so they turn off as soon as you start to kind of start to heavily sell a product to them so you have to really be going there with a genuine interest and wanting to help those people in some way and they’ll be receptive to that.

Paul: Now you talk there about researching and going and finding out where people congregate and where they are online. How do you go about doing that process? You know, what’s involved in researching?

Mel: So, first of all you need to know kind of who you’re targeting your product at so know your product inside out before you go out there to start to try to find where those people are. Then once you know the kind of topics they’re likely to be discussing or the types of people that you’re after, looking for groups. User groups, Google is fantastic resource that should be used fully. I know it’s so simple, but so many people don’t spend enough time fully researching on Google kind of the different sites that are available or the different social networks that they can join so the first thing that I do, I know that everybody kind of mentions it now but having a look on Facebook, seeing what kind of groups are out there, checking LinkedIn, seeing what activities are taking place already. Setting up Google Alerts, using TweetDeck with alerts on there so that you’re currently being updated with the conversation as it’s taking place and then you’re kind of in a position to join that and to have something that you feel will be valuable that you can contribute to that.

Paul: So those alerts and things that you’re setting up aren’t necessarily alerts
directly related to your own brand or your own products but alerts to what things that your target audience might be interested in?

Mel: Yes, so for me I would set up alerts that were dating specific so that I know the current issues that are going on. I then may set up alerts thinking “OK, well our target audience is 18 to 35. Generally, what’s of interest to these people?” And setting up alerts, it can be completely abstract, searches out there. For example, if you’re targeting guys, I know it’s stereotypical I guess, but um, new beer brands, new video games. Things that you know that they’re likely to have an interest in that you can start to build some commonality there.

Paul: So you’re not even, in that situation you’re not necessarily, I’m guessing with dating you go after guys quite heavily. They’re a big audience to you so you wouldn’t necessarily go after alerts for dating related stuff, it could necessarily be kind of alerts for anything your target audience are interested in, just so you can work out where they are I’m guessing.

Mel: Absolutely. I mean if you look at the dating industry as an example. If we’re targeting guys, we may know that guys in that age have certain interests whether that’s gaming or socializing with friends that may not consider going on a dating site but if you’re already talking to them and raising your own brand awareness then when they get to the point they’re considering a dating site, you’ve already built that brand with them and they recognize you as a name so.

Paul: Sure. I think the thing that often strikes me that both clients and web designers maybe aren’t involved in in marketing is that they often underestimate how long all this stuff takes. To build that relationship and that brand takes a considerable time. It doesn’t kind of happen overnight and often people seem to expect instant results which surprises me. I saw one other thing as a use of Twitter that kind of grabbed my attention and I wondered if you did the same thing was that he would create alerts on questions, whether it be whatever, so that when somebody asks a question, you can go in and respond. Is that the kind of thing you do as well?

Mel: Absolutely. It’s not just about going in and leeching off the community. It’s about going out there to give them the answers to their questions so that you are actually providing a service and some value to them rather than just spamming them and I think that really is the difference. It’s about wanting what’s best for your users rather than just trying to sell your service.

Paul: Yeah. I’m guessing that people can kind of see through anything that’s more direct these days and are uncomfortable with it.

Mel: Well there’s so much of it, unfortunately.

Paul: Yeah, there is. Let’s talk about techniques then, or techniques and tools. You’ve already talked about TweetDeck, you talked about Twitter, you know you mentioned alerts, Google Alerts and that kind of thing. What other kind of tools do you use for reaching people that you, your target audience? What other tools are available to you?

Mel: Um, so for us a big thing is the blog. Being able to have an open conversation with our community. Whether that’s with partners that are using us or the end members that are signing up to the sites. I think for me one of the biggest things with the blog was probably with Formations when we didn’t actually have a product, but we already had people waiting to use it by the time we launched it. And that was purely by going out there saying, “We’re going out as a new venture. We totally want your opinion. We want to know what it is that you are looking for from our service.” And then when you finally go out there and you roll out your new service or your product and you’ve built in their feedback then all of a sudden you give them a sense of ownership and they become your brand advocate so I can’t talk highly enough about the blogs but that’s assuming you actually listen to the feedback. Having a blog and just having it be one way would never work.

Paul: I mean it’s interesting there that you talked about having an open conversation through your blogs…

Mel: Yeah

Paul: …and using the feedback that you receive. How do you go about that? How do you stimulate conversation? I mean I’ve had clients that have set up a blog and they’ve written a lot of article and never a comment will appear, you know. What kind of ways do you use for stimulating that conversation?

Mel: OK, I probably shouldn’t say this. Oh, no, it’s all gonna go down hill, but poking friends, I know it sounds bad. Poking friends to try to get them to spread the word for you. You never know what contacts those people will have. You will have built up a network of people yourself and it’s about not being afraid to ask those people for help. Everybody needs help at some point so asking them to spread a link if they can. But then also when you’re going out there and you’re talking to people that you think are going to have some interest in your blog don’t be afraid to go into conversation, add something and drop your link there, but that’s not going in and purely just linking, like link baiting at all. Have something valuable to say, but don’t be afraid to link that to your own site.

Paul: But what if you’ve kind of got people that are coming to your blog but they’re not engaging, they’re not posting comments? So you’ve got an audience but they’re a very passive audience. Is there stuff you can do to encourage them to participate more?

Mel: Very much. I think the way that the blog is used can be critical on how many comments and how interactive that then becomes. I think Gary Vaynerchuk does a fantastic job on his blog where at the end of each video he tells you to comment. It’s very very easy to see as soon as you hit his page, what you need to do to leave a comment or to contact him on Twitter. The call to action there is very very clear. And similarly the videos that I do at Random Mel, the first and last thing I do is to put the URL at the start and end of the video and then if I want someone’s comments on something specifically then I make sure that I tell them what to do. You can’t just assume that your users are going to know, or want to comment, so you have to really prompt that from them.

Paul: Yeah, I mean I’ve seen that a lot in blog posts where the blog post has been written as this diatribe of “I’m the expert. I know what I’m talking about. Here’s the stuff,” and you’ve got nowhere to go as far as responding to it. It’s almost like the person doesn’t want a response. They’re certainly not asking for feedback, or they’re not asking any kind of question you can respond to.< /p>

Mel: Absolutely, and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter how senior you may be within your industry or how much you know. There’s always something that you can be learning from these people. And being able to get feedback from those, that’s information and data that these huge organizations that aren’t up to speed with social media yet would pay thousands of pounds for. So it’s a real advantage if you use it properly.

Paul: I mean there’s a kind of follow on issue here that you’ve kind of built some excitement around whatever your product or service is, you may have done enough work to get in the position that you’re currently in of actually having a group of passionate people there waiting for your product to launch, and creating that initial buzz is easy, or easier but it’s maintaining that buzz over a long period of time and maintaining that engagement with users so I’m interested in how you go about keeping that relationship going over the longer term. What kinds of things do you do there?

Mel: So one of the main things here I think is having content available to them. Having something new so they have an incentive to come back. You can’t just expect to launch and for that high wave to be maintained. But I also think that it’s worthwhile bearing in mind that you should be there just to facilitate the conversation between them. If it’s some kind of website that you have, for example, for people to communicate with one another. It’s not necessarily for them to communicate with you, but you’re helping them to achieve whatever it is that they want to get out of your service.

Paul: Yeah.

Mel: So continually trying to update your service to make it the best that it can possibly be and to actually have a look back and to not be afraid to change it if you can see that users are using the service in a slightly different way than you thought they were going to. Not being afraid to go, “OK, well it’s not quite what we had planned, but let’s go along that route.” Just as flickr was born I guess.

Paul: Yeah.

Mel: So being able to change that and giving the users a sense of ownership. I can’t stress how important that is. Because they become your advocates and no matter how well you communicate with these people, you’re always going to be the person that is promoting a product or service, whereas your users are doing it because they genuinely believe in you.

Paul: There’s a kind of interesting potential problem in that, that if you as a marketing person is the person that is engaging with the community and if the community is feeding back ideas about the product and service and you’re wanting to take those on board, there’s gotta be a very good relationship between marketing and the people actually developing the product or service. How has that worked in the past? Have you found that people have been very receptive to that?

Mel: Um, so we’ve had something very very similar here at White Label where we are now positioned with the development team, because as far as I see it, marketing and development very much fit as one. And marketing now own all of the projects that we’re doing so that we were able to take our users needs to drive that forward and to prioritize that. Development is incredibly important, but it really does have to be the users’ needs that drive forward what’s most important to them. And so we have regular updates with the development teams but like I say we very much take responsibility for new features and functionality which is added there.

Paul: That’s very interesting. There’ll be a lot of people that’s listening to this podcast that are probably deeply uncomfortable with the idea of new features being driven out of marketing.

Mel: Yeah.

Paul: Why do you think it should be marketing where that’s based rather than the development team?

Mel: I say marketing simply because in terms of my role I very much kind of look at the usability of the site…

Paul: OK

Mel: …so trying to increase user experience so maybe that’s kind of somewhere in between I guess, rather than traditional marketing. But if I can see conversations that are taking place and I can see how users are kind of functioning on the site and how we might want to implement changes then it’s kind of easier to get buy in from the development team when I can go to them with hard evidence as to what it is our users actually want.

Paul: I mean that’s quite a quantum shift in the way that marketing operates. Do you get a sense that marketing as a discipline is changing quite radically and if so, in what kind of ways?

Mel: Absolutely. I guess when you introduced me as a marketeer I cringed slightly because I did marketing years back when I worked in a bank and things were very very different back then. But I would say that marketing now has very much come along the lines that it is grass roots and that’s what I feel comfortable with. It’s not necessarily acting as a marketing function but it’s about being a user advocate and working out what can we possibly do to make their lives as easy as possible and to delight them? So not just give them the service that they’re expecting but that little bit extra as well. And I think that’s where marketing comes in now because then as soon as they’re happy, there are so many tools out there for those tools to vocalize whether they’re happy with the service or not, they do the rest of the work for you.

Paul: So do you find that largely it’s about creating a passionate, enthusiastic community that then does peer to peer word of mouth marketing rather than sinking large amounts of money into banner advertising or whatever else?

Mel: Totally and we find that it’s sustainable whereas if you pay for PPC and as soon as you stop that you’ll tend find that traffic to the site will stop as well. Whereas if you’ve got an active community out there that are truly engaged with what you have to offer then that’s going to be sustainable in the long run.

Paul: Of course the downside to that is that you’re not in control of the message in the same way as you would be with traditional marketing and that you are very dependent on the good will of your community for that to succeed. So the question then arises, what do you do when things go tits up? What do you when things go wrong and there’s negative publicity and people are bitching and moaning online? How do you manage that ki
nd of situation?

Mel: I think from my point of view it would be to not be scared to hold your hands up and to admit when you’ve made a mistake. If you can be totally transparent in what you’re doing and you can explain why something hasn’t gone quite right. If you look at Facebook and how they took a step back not that long ago I think that was quite a brave move for them, but then you become an approachable company that people realize it’s humans behind the brand and as soon as you have that they become a lot more forgiving. Obviously there are going to be some people out there that bitch about you no matter what and unfortunately they are going to exist but all that you can do is kind of educate them as well as you can so they’re portraying the right message for you and then if it is as case that you’ve done something that your community don’t agree with, holding your hands up and not being afraid to change that to their demand.

Paul: I mean it’s interesting there that you talk about exposing the humans behind the brand, that increasingly seems to be the philosophy of a lot of companies, to encourage their employees to blog and to twitter and to do all of these kinds of things. But I think in a lot of other companies there’s quite a high level of fear again about losing control of the message and that traditionally that’s something that marketing want to do and the idea of opening it up to everybody within the company seems quite horrendous. How would you reassure people that are having those kinds of doubts?

Mel: I think if there’s a small-scale project that you can start that on to prove that the fear is often a lot worse than the actual reality behind it then that’s always a good way to begin. I would say that enabling your staff to have a voice is always a great way if they’re able to blog or to tweet. That’s not to say that you don’t go out there and say, “OK. If you’re going to be associated with the company, you need to be careful,” for their own rights as well as ours. You still have to be sensible with what you’re doing out there, but at the end of the day people buy from people they don’t buy from big companies. And the most successful companies out there are the ones where their employees truly believe in the products and they kind of do a lot of the work for you rather than just marketing function.

Paul: Very interesting. I mean to some degree mind these days, increasingly all of us online are having to be marketeers to some extent. We’re all managing our own personal brands and our own personal identities and who we are and how we’re perceived online. I’m quite interested in your perspective of that, because I know that you have been amazingly honest and open online and that that’s come back to bite you on some occasions. So what kinds of hints and tips would you give to people that are trying to manage their online identity? I hate that phrase, that sounds awful, but you know what I mean. You know what I mean.

Mel: Yeah. So, I think my biggest word of advice would be to be yourself. I think at the end of the day, if you can go to bed at night and you can sleep knowing that you’ve been true to yourself and you haven’t gone out there and tried to scam anyone or anything like that then I think that’s the biggest hurdle. There will always be some people that will question or criticize whatever moves you make but that’s a sign that they’re actually paying attention so although that may not be positive, it’s kind of the old PR way I guess, that any publicity is better than no publicity. And I guess for me, work with companies that fit your ethos. So, I’ve been approached by companies before where I’ve felt really kind of uncomfortable around the product that they’re offering. I don’t feel that I could sell it whole heartedly. I know that that will reflect personally on me so I will only associate myself with products and services that I truly believe in. I think that then kind of maintains people’s perspective of you I guess. But yeah, being honest is the main thing I think.

Paul: What about in regards to how open you are? I mean we’ve talked a lot about open and transparency. Is there a line do you think? Is there a point where you should just shut your mouth and not speak, so to speak?

Mel: I think that there is, and I think that that varies for each individual and it really depends on how comfortable you feel online. Some people are quite happy putting everything out there, and so that’s absolutely fine for them, that works. I’m probably among one of those. Exhibitionist, if you will. And then there are other people, they don’t want everybody to see what’s going on on Facebook. They don’t want everyone to know what’s going on in their personal lives. And that’s absolutely fine too. So you have to do whatever fits with you best. I mean, for me personally, I’m very very out there in the space and that’s just because that’s the way that I choose to lead my life. That said, you generally, apart from me on Twitter saying that boys smell, won’t find me talking about relationships or stuff that’s hugely personal to me. It will be about my lifestyle, it will be about my work, but it won’t be incredibly personal stuff. That’s my line, so. What’s your line?

Paul: I don’t know what my line is. I knew you were going to say that. That’s just because I’ve just posted on Twitter that I’m chronically depressed and don’t want to work anymore. So you’re picking me up on that. No, I think for me, I tend to say everything slightly tongue in cheek, but then there will always be a kind of element of truth in it. So I perhaps am more personal than I think I am online, but I just dress it up in humor to kind of cover it up so, I mean that comment, for example. Yeah, I’m a bit pissed off today and I’m not really in the mood for working, so I’ll exaggerate it and make a joke out of it and make a bit of fun out of it. Sometimes that can be really dangerous. Humor does not translate very well, especially into text format. So yeah, it’s difficult isn’t it? It’s kind of, you have to feel it out and work it out for yourselves I guess. Anyway this is supposed to be me interviewing you, you’re not allowed to ask questions to me.

Mel: I’m sorry.

Paul: You’re breaking the rules Mel. OK, one last question to wrap up with. Which is that, let’s face it, social media has become a little bit of a dirty word at the moment.

Mel: I hate that now.

Paul: I know, it’s horrible, horrible, horrible. And there’s so many people out there that are kind of piggy-backing off of the back of it and I’m fed up. If I have one more person decide to follow me on Twitter that’s got the words “social media” in their title I’m gonna scream, but underlying all of that, actually there is something of value there and it’s this whole, you know, what we’ve been talking about really, this whole kind of community driven aspect to marketing and to our product development and all of that good stuff. But, here’s your chance to rant Mel. Give us some of the things that really anno
y you about social media. Some myths maybe that surround social media that need dispelling.

Mel: Oh my goodness, and this is to wrap up?

Paul: Yeah. Something light and breezy to end with.

Mel: OK. So, for me, everybody saying that social media is really really easy would be my biggest thing. It’s easy enough to do, if you know what you’re doing, but not everyone can do it. Some people know how to communicate with communities, other people don’t. And it’s kind of about knowing your strengths so, for example, some people may be hugely technical, but when it comes to knowing how to market themselves they aren’t always that forthcoming. And so it really does depend on the person that you’ve got doing your social media for you I guess. My next big one would be that giving away ideas and content shouldn’t be free, that you should be charging for that in some way. I know there are plenty of people out there that say that. But if you’re going to be seen as an expert, you have to prove yourself. You can’t walk into a space and kind of stamp your feet and say, “OK, look. Pay me as a social media expert because I know so much.” You have to provide something to people, show that you know what you’re doing and be prepared to do a lot of work for free in the meanwhile and then gradually those paid projects will come along. Next one would probably be viral campaigns. Easy. They’re very hit and miss. Everyone now thinks they can upload a video to YouTube and now hit the big time and it’s really not the case. It really does depend on the audience and how they react to each piece that’s put out there. And then I guess my last one, and it’s my last one, I promise, will be that there’s now way of tracking the effectiveness of a social media campaign. I just don’t believe that at all. I think that no matter what you’re working on you should always set yourself targets. Now whether that’s a number of comments that you want to appear on a blog post or a number of members that you want to sign up, search engine optimization. There are so many things that you can track, but everyone still believes it’s slightly fluffy, and are nice to have and I couldn’t disagree with that more. So…

Paul: I like that one. That’s a really good one. I totally support you in that, that I think that making things measurable, even if you don’t meet those targets, I think having targets and aiming towards them is vitally important.

Mel: Absolutely. And anybody who comes in and says that they can do social media for you without those, I wouldn’t trust in a million years.

Paul: Excellent Mel! That was really interesting! It’s really good for us to kind of branch out and look at these things. You know the Web is becoming so much more than just putting up websites and we need to be talking about this kind of stuff more so it’s great to have you on the show. Thank you for your time.

Mel: Thank you for inviting me.

Paul: We’ll have you back again soon, no doubt. Goodbye!

Mel: Thank you.

Much thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview

Listeners feedback:

In this week’s listeners section, Marcus answers a question about handling criticism from clients and we hear from Japh about Internet Explorers future.

The need for having a thick skin

This question in from Bill:

Currently my working life seems to be one long string of criticism and rejection. I try to get involved in debate as guys like you recommend I should, but my ‘real-world’ take on things usually gets shot down.

Trying to win work is even worse. I try to make sure that I don’t give too much away to potential clients up front and I try to discuss sensible budgets with them, but their expectation is that I will redesign their homepage for nothing to ‘see if I’m good enough’ and any budget request is met with ‘you tell me’.

Even though Paul and I pretend to be big and tough, nothing-can-touch-us types, the truth is rather different. My constant need for adoration and Paul’s megalomania mean that we both take criticism very hard. Ok, I’m joking, but there is a grain of truth in there.

No-one likes criticism or rejection, so what’s the best way to soften any blows?

All of the people

If you decide to lay your soul bare in a blog or regularly provide advice in a forum or through articles, then chances are someone will disagree with you. Quite often they’ll be rude and destructive in their criticism as well.

Try and take any positive criticism as an addition to any debate and get wholeheartedly involved. But, be prepared to accept that, sometimes, you might just actually be wrong.

To those people who are intent on using you as a punch-bag – ignore them. Getting into any kind of argument will almost certainly end up with you looking and feeling worse. You will tend to find that you have a lot of allies in situations like these – let them fight on your behalf.

So, accept it, you cannot please all of the people all of the time.

Go for it

All that said, you should still get involved in debate, post questions and views and comment as much as you can. You will get yourself known and even if that’s as the ‘real world’ guy then so be it.v

I’m guessing that the work you are trying to win is fairly low-end. Getting involved in discussion is a very effective way of promoting yourself. It shows that you are keen and (hopefully) that you know what you are talking about. This should start to attract a better calibre of client.

However, this does not happen overnight, so be patient.

You’re worth it

Trust you’re ‘gut’ when dealing with potential clients. Quite often people are genuine when they say that they have no idea of budget. This doesn’t automatically mean that they are a waste of time; just that they need educating in your processes.

However, if someone is trying to manipulate you into doing work for free – and that doesn’t necessarily mean doing unpaid mock-ups, it can just as easily mean scoping out an idea (why should you not be paid for being creative?) – then walk away. You will regret it if you don’t.

Walk away.

Talk money

I’ve said this before so apologies for the repetition but I think it’s important.

Ask people, up front, what their budget is. Explain that you need to know it to respond with the most appropriate solution for them. You may only be able to squeeze in a quick 2 or 3 page flat site within their budget or you may be able to offer a huge variety of functionality and testing.

If you don’t get anywhere by asking (and, as I mentioned previously, they really may not have a clue) then create a 2 or 3 paragraph solution with associated tasks (a mini proposal if you like) and email that to them with an associated ballpark price.

This will either stimulate discussion or get you dismissed out of hand. Both outcomes are good news.

Stick to your guns

We decided, quite a while back, and for very good reason, that we would not do any unpaid mock-up design work. In some cases this
has been seen as a positive thing (once it has been explained) but with other potential projects I’m sure it has adversely affected our chances of winning the work. However, we should stick to what we believe is right. Chopping and changing presents a negative image to both potential clients and our staff.

If you do decide to present initial mock-up ideas don’t be tempted into iterating them further. Any client who asks for is again asking for free work and is most definitely to be avoided.

Stay calm!

Sometimes the people we have to deal with are mouth-open-wide-unbelievable in their arrogance, rudeness, pickiness, narrow-mindedness, impatience etc etc…

Sometimes we are manipulated into doing work for free.

Sometimes we are strung along through a pitch process when we have no chance of winning it.

This can be a little irksome and, at times, we may feel that an adversarial approach is the right one! It isn’t. It can only damage your reputation.

Even if you don’t see eye-to-eye with someone it doesn’t mean that they will never hire you or recommend you to someone else.

So, in essence, work on your patience, cherish your good clients and keep your skin thick.

IE6 and IE8

Finally, Japh has posted an Audioboo on last week’s discussion about the future of Internet Explorer.

Hi. So, there’s been a lot of talk lately about the IE8 being moved to an important update hopefully to prompt people to upgrade form IE7 or whatever previous version to IE8. So, I just wanted to put in my two cents and specifically I guess this is a response to Paul Boag’s recent audio review about this topic. I agree with Paul that IE8 being an important update won’t kill IE6, mostly due to corporations. As IE7 was made a high security update quite some time ago and a lot of users upgraded before then and since then from IE6 to 7. I think those users will proceed as they have been and upgrade to IE8 like the good little lemmings that they are. And it will be the corporates that are stuck back in IE6. Mostly, I think, this has to do with maintenance periods and things like that and the various support deals that corporations have with Microsoft. But there is some good news there as well in as much as Windows XP’s life span is being reduced. Microsoft’s reducing support on that to be the extended support instead of their main line support which basically means you only get security fixes and that’s all. So, for corporations, even though they’ve paid up and so they get it little bit longer than everybody else it’s kind of a bit of a kick in the pants for them and telling them they need to move into high gear and start upgrading their standard operating environments to include the latest operating system which will include hopefully the latest browser – IE7 at least if not IE8. And I think that’s probably going to start happening early to mid next year. So, it’s not too far off before we would have , you know, hopefully, complete death of IE6. That’s my two cents.

If you are an iPhone user then why not submit a question via AudioBoo yourself? Go to Audioboo.fm for more information. Once you have recorded your boo tag it with “for boagworld”. No iPhone? No problem. You can also submit comments by skyping “boagworldshow” or emailing us an MP3 file.

161. In or Out

Posted in Classic shows on April 14, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul announces Micro-Boagworld, we discuss the pros and cons of outsourcing web work and see what recommendation the Boagworld forum has to offer.

Podcast: Download (20.2MB)

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Housekeeping

For a while I have been toying with the idea of doing a Micro-podcast that works in a similar way to Twitter but with audio. It would provide the opportunity to share hits, tricks and reviews too short for the main show. My problem was that I needed an application which made this as easy as posting a tweet. Anything more and it would prove too demanding.

Fortunately a new iPhone application has launched that does exactly that. Called AudioBoo it allows you to record 3 minute audio snippets that then get posted to a website, twitter, facebook and a podcast feed.

I am therefore pleased to announce Micro-Boagworld…

View Micro-Boagworld posts here

Subscribe to the RSS feed here

News

Pricing and projects

Alyssa Gregory has written two good posts this week both relating to the pricing of web projects.

The first post tackles the notoriously difficult subject of How To Estimate Time For A Project. After all, time is money.

Estimating how long a project will take is tricky and although this post doesn’t provide any magic formulas it does provide good solid advice.

As well as considering the obvious deliverables Alyssa also recommends time for project management, reviewing work, debugging and client turn around. Finally, she recommends adding a buffer for the unexpected.

Of course, she doesn’t discuss how all of this time translates into your final price. How much you charge is a matter of conjecture. However, in a second post she does explore a related subject – How To Raise Your Rates.

In this post, she handles the sensitive subject of how to tell a client that you will be raising your rates for future projects. She suggests five techniques you should employ…

Give Notice
Set a schedule (make increases annual for example)
Make it fair (keep the increments small and manageable by the client)
Send it in writing
Balance it out (Balance your increase with an incentive – e.g. a special, a one-time discount)

Its all good advice and important too. As your skills and experience increase, you will need to ensure your rates reflect that. Knowing how to hand those rate increases is vital if you want to keep your clients happy.

IE8 and IE6

Microsoft have announced that IE8 will be released via the Windows Automatic Update starting on the third week of April.

The final version of the browser has been available since March and yet adoption has been sluggish. Hopefully Automatic update will change this trend significantly. However, it does not guarantee universal adoption. Although the update will be marked as important users will not be forced to upgrade. In fact Microsoft has released a blocker toolkit so corporate users can avoid the update entirely.

Worst of all, it is likely that the update will impact the numbers using IE7 more than IE6. IE6 users tend to be hold outs and are unlikely to upgrade now when they did not upgrade to IE7.

The only hope is that many IT departments have a policy of running a version behind the current release. If that is the case, the arrival of IE8 may encourage some of them to adopt IE7.

The entire web design community is keen to reduce its level of support for IE6 and hopefully this update will allow that. In fact, another post this week entitled – 10 Cool Things We’ll Be Able To Do Once IE6 Is Dead – points out just what a wonderful world it would be.

Once IE6 is gone we will be able to…

Use child selectors
Make full use of 24-bit PNGs
Use attribute selectors
Use a wider range of display properties
Use min-width and max-width
Throw away 90% of CSS hacks (and 90% of the reasons for needing them!)
Add abbreviations that everyone can see
Trust z-index again
Save time and money
Enjoy ourselves again!

Simple and impressive design techniques

Last week I was doing a consultancy clinic with a developer who wanted advice on designing his website. He was a great coder but did not have much experience designing.

Although I recommended The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird it would have been great to point him at the latest Smashing Magazine post – 10 Simple and Impressive Design Techniques.

This post has some easy to implement techniques that are ideal for developers trying to improve their design skills. Techniques include…

Adding Contrast
Using Gradients
A Better Use of Colour
Improved Letter Spacing
Changing Case
Use of Anti-Aliasing
Adding Imperfections
Implementing blurring
Careful Alignment
Trimming the Fat

Read the whole articles for more details and great examples of these techniques in action.

Influencing user behaviour

A big part of good design is guiding the user to complete the actions you want. Influencing user behaviour can be achieved through a variety of techniques. However, it can often be hard to know where to begin.

One resource that might help you influence user behaviour is The Design with Intent Toolkit. This is essentially a printable ‘cheat sheet’ that suggests a variety of techniques you can apply to your projects.

The techniques do not just apply to web design but all aspects of design. Consequently not all of the techniques will apply. However a lot do, ranging from the use of metaphors to setting up good default options.

Some of the techniques contained in this cheat sheet are also beautifully demonstrated in another post I wanted to mention. Entitled 12 Excellent Examples of "Lazy Registration" it addresses the problem of user signup.

Essentially it is a post that showcases methods for getting around the problem of user registration. As the post itself says…

Signup forms have long irked the casual visitor. During the process of discovery, nobody wants to stop and fill out details before they can "unlock" the rest of the site’s potential.

It has certainly been my experience that signup forms are a barrier and so it is interesting to see how different web applications have overcome the problem.

Feature: When to outsource web work

Your in charge of your organisations website. It has become moderately successful and now you have a decision. Do you hire a full time web designer or outsource to a web design agency?

Read the full article

Listeners feedback:

In this week’s listener feedback section we look at a series of recommendations from the Boagworld forum…

A good introduction to Javascript

Jake writes: I’m curious as to whether or not anyone on the forum has strong opinions on a good introductory javascript book? And by introductory I mean something that’s more about initial learning steps such as syntax, etc. and then talks about best practices.

Doug answers: You might want to look at one of the books out for coding in jQuery, if you’re planning on going in that direction anyway. As for how to learn javascript I usually push people towards Lynda.com.

Matt also replies: Awesome book – DOM Scripting – I’d start with this before jQuery as I think you need some javascript knowledge to use jQuery to its fullest.

A good but free survey tool

Simon asks: I want to create some simple(ish) survey’s to get clients to fill out after a training session. I know of some paid for solutions, but does anyone have any suggestions for any free tools?

Laura replies: For something short, I’d use the survey function on PollDaddy. You can get up to 100 responses, and I think ten questions. Ten isn’t many, but you can do conditional branching for free, which is rare, and good.

I’ve also used SurveyMonkey before, it’s clean and simple.

A review of Clicktales

Peter shares his experiences of Clicktales…

On the recommendation of Paul, I tired out ClickTales.com; and I have to say the results have been interesting (sad, in my personal case) to say the least.

For those of you not in "the know", or missed episode 141, ClickTales is an app that lets you record and review the actions of your website’s visitors. And I’d agree with Paul: inexpensive, revealing, but limited in essence because you can witness what a user goes through.

In my case it was most effective because my results have been telling me that I should redesign my website’s structure completely… so I decided I should start from scratch all together and redesign. :)

Web Design for ROI

Bill reviews Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus…

Each year I find one or two books that really stand out. This book, Web Design for ROI, changed the way I look at current eCommerce projects and helped me identify better strategies for building web sites.

Rich adds: I agree this is an excellent book.

Not too much new for a seasoned pro like myself, but I did still learn a fair bit and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in websites that make money.

Pro Paypal e-commerce

Finally, Ian shares an extensive review of the book ‘Pro Paypal e-commerce‘. Ian writes a very thorough review but here are a couple of highlights.

I thought this was a great read. It’s not often you finish a book and feel confident you have all the information you’re going to need to complete your project. The book isn’t just technical but also has lots of useful nuggets on business practices and background on payment systems in general for those that are unfamiliar with them at this level.

I feel confident in recommending this book to anyone who is involved with developing E-commerce systems or is going to be in the future. The author Damon Williams has a very readable style that is mercifully faux-humour free but never dull and explains everything clearly and concisely and despite its relatively low page count at 260 pages or so, still manages to cover a lot of ground without ever feeling as if it’s being too terse.

For more reviews about everything from web design books to software visit the Boagworld forum. We are also going to do some cool new stuff on the forum over the coming weeks. Keep an eye on it. We have already added a Jobs category for those of you who are looking to hire a web designer, so be sure to check that out.

159. Special Guest

Posted in Classic shows on April 1, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: The northerners are back with special guest host Sarah Parmenter.

Podcast: Download (29.1MB)

On this week’s show: The north erners are back with special guest host Sarah Parmenter. We answer your questions on how to quote for projects and whether using off-the-shelf software is wrong and we have a chat with Sarah on her experiences in the industry and the difference between developing for clients and developing for yourself.

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News

Alkaline

Our first story for is a new product by the guys over at Litmus, you may have come across their Browser and Email testing apps before and they’ve just released a new Mac app called Alkaline, this is a Mac front-end to their online browser testing suite and lets you test your website designs across not only 17 different Windows browsers which they mention on the site, but also all of the Mac and Linux browsers that the online Litmus services test against.

Alkaline grabs screenshots of your site rendered in all major browsers, the number of which depends on your chosen pricing plan, It’s free to test against IE7 and FF2 and if you need to test across all browsers, it’s available under the standard Litmus pricing plan which offers both individual and team monthly subscriptions, and a handy day-pass if you only do this kind of testing every now & then. Litmus also stores a history of your screenshots so you can see the evolution of your design and also reports your HTML and CSS errors.

There’s plugins available for Textmate and Coda, and you can preview the sites right inside Coda 1.6’s preview window, however because Alkaline grabs screenshots of your pages it’s not possible to do any live updating of CSS and see the results in all browsers.

Paul at Litmus also informed me that throughout April, they’re offering full access to the Litmus service for free on Weekends, so on Saturday and Sunday you can test across all the browsers (using Alkaline or the Litmus site) and all the email clients, even if you only have a free account.

16 design tools for prototyping and wireframing

It’s no secret that prototyping or wireframing can really help in the overall design process, and there’s now a wide range of tools on the market that aim to help you in this process. A recent Sitepoint article lists 16 of these tools and rates their usefulness.

The list of tools is good, convering favourites such as Omnigraffle, Axure and Balsamiq to other applications which can be used to wireframe such as Powerpoint or Keynote. If you’ve not looked into these kind of apps before then do check it out, they also lists the price of the apps so you’re sure to find something within your budget.

10 Lessons every freelancer should learn

If I remember rightly, I came across this link from one of the people I follow on Twitter and it covers some killer tips on how to be a better freelancer, covering everything from self promotion, organising your workflow, finding time for your own projects, keeping motivated and how to charge appropriately, this is a must-read for anyone considering freelancing, or indeed those already in the freelance world.

Some great tips come in the way of keeping customers happy and generating repeat business and I’d like to squeeze in a forth link here to another Sitepoint article (sorry) which covers how to upsell additional services to clients as a freelancer you should be looking at maximising the amount of money you can make from each project through added services, whether it’s packaged services such as hosting, logo design or business cards.

I don’t really freelance but I do manage a couple of small sites I built on a freelance basis, and I get recurring revenue by hosting them on a small reseller account. I’ve also been able to tempt the customers into paying for a years hosting rather than a monthly cost by rounding the amount down to an even figure, which while it’s only a couple of pounds cheaper, always got chosen.

Interview: Sarah Parmenter on the difference between developing for clients and developing for yourself

Ryan: OK, so onto our interview section and what we are going to do today is an off-the-cuff interview with you, Sarah, er, so for people who don’t know who you are, er, do you want to introduce yourself.

Sarah: Sure, my name’s Sarah, I’m based in Leigh On Sea in sunny old Essex and I own a company called ‘You Know Who Design‘ that’s been going for about nearly seven years now, um, and I just do web development and sometimes I dabble in a bit of graphic design. Um, when I started off when I was younger, it was more graphic design than web but now it’s purely web and, er, yeah, it’s what I love doing.

Ryan: Right, OK, and we think a good topic to have a chat with you about would be the difference between developing for clients and developing for yourself.

Sarah: Yup

Ryan: So, er, let’s start off. Do you give yourself time to work on personal projects?

Sarah: I do, but not as much as other people do; whenever I see on Twitter, there’s a lot of people who have a lot of personal projects on the go and it generally tens to be on a Friday as well (all laugh), you see Twitter on a Friday, generally full of people, um, doing their own stuff but I tend to, if I’m doing something I tend to, maybe, give myself a couple of hours if I’ve got a spare, if I’m waiting for a client to get back to me on something and I can’t proceed with anything. I put client work first, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but that’s the thing that pays the bills, so, um, they always come first and if I’ve got a bit of downtime, I’ve always got projects that I want to work on, but possibly haven’t got the amount of time to dedicate to them as I’d like. I think it’s probably the case with everyone.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. You get some time, don’t you, through work?

Paul: Er, well we did sweet talk our boss into giving us 5% time, which was supposed to be like Google’s 20% time, where they get a whole day to work on personal projects, if it benefits the company.

Sarah: Really?

Paul: Yeah, well we got, like an afternoon on a Friday, which is kind of sidelined at the moment.

Ryan: To spend in the pub (laughs)

Paul: That’s personal projects, I’m sure. No, it’s kind of sidelined at the moment, we’ve got some major projects on which are taking up all our time with some heavy deadlines, so we’ve had to shuffle that. Hopefully we’ll start to get that back over the summer and work on some cool stuff instead of the business stuff.

Sarah: I think it’s rea
lly difficult, because obviously your client stuff does have to come first, and even if you’ve dedicated an afternoon or a couple of hours, if something comes up that morning, or if you’ve got a problem that needs sorting, unfortunately, it’s just the way it is, your client work has got to come first.

Paul: Yeah, pays the bills.

Sarah: I mean, a lot of personal projects, a lot of people’s personal projects, do end up very lucrative for them, and you could argue that it’s just as lucrative to just go along with your own personal projects, but I think in general, most people would find that their client work would, er, would have to come first.

Paul: We’re trying to convince our boss to let us build, er, an iPhone app

Sarah: Really?

Paul: and sell it on the app store. He’s not having none of it, because we’ve told him we all need iPhones to test it on, he just won’t buy them for us.

Ryan: and a mac to develop on

Paul: a Mac to develop on, yeah. For some reason, he’s not warming to the idea.

Ryan: he can’t understand the thirty grand, you know, outlay to…

Paul: We’ll easily make that in a day on the app store (all laugh), I keep telling him this.

Sarah: the app store!

Paul: Yeah, the app’s 50p, you know…

Ryan: Er, completely sidetracked there, erm. What differences do you find, er, between developing for clients and developing for yourself? What major differences do you find?

Sarah: I find, when I’m doing stuff for myself, I’m actually a lot less decisive on stuff. I sort of, because I’m immersed in, maybe my own branding, or sometimes it’s really good to look at it from an outsider’s point of view. If you’re doing stuff for clients, I think sometimes it’s easier to look at stuff and go ‘well, that needs to go there and that needs to be there to catch someone’s attention’ or you need to move that or make that a different colour, and when it’s your own stuff I think you tend to be either really creative and you don’t really care if you get stuff wrong, or if, do you know what I mean? It’s more, sort of… the boundaries aren’t there, you’re not time-constrained, there’s no brief, you just go off on one, doing whatever you want, whereas with client stuff, there tends to be a bit more, erm, what’s the word, consistency across everything, and I find, personally, when I’m doing my personal stuff, I could sit in front of Photoshop pushing something from the left-hand side of the screen to the right-hand side of the screen for two hours, wondering whether it looks right or not, whereas if it’s a client site, I think ‘right, I have to make a decision on this – where would this go, or where would it be best placed, and you make a decision and you move on, because otherwise the more time you, you take going backwards and forwards is, er, less money that you’re earning, so I think I tend to be more decisive with client work and with my own I tend to be a bit more, erm, easy-going and, er, possibly a bit more creative, in the sense of trying things that I haven’t tried before. Erm, yeah, I think it’s just good to be (pause – all laugh).

Paul: I think personal projects give you time to play with the stuff that you wouldn’t normally risk putting into a client’s site, things that might take you a week to figure out.

Sarah: That’s what I, sorry a man just walked past my window in a pair of shorts, as I was answering that question, which completely put me off,

Ryan: Was it an ugly man, or a good-looking man?

Sarah: No, he was an old man.

Ryan: Oh, right. OK

Sarah: I wondered if he had dementia or something, and he thought it was summer.

Paul: Was he in just a pair of shorts?

Sarah: Yeah

Ryan: A pair of shorts and a smile?

Sarah: No, and a newspaper.

Paul: Strategically placed.

Sarah: It just completely sidetracked my thinking pattern, then.

Paul: That’s OK.

Sarah: Oh, sorry.

Ryan: Where were we? So, which do you prefer, developing for clients, because obviously you’re doing that every day, or do you prefer developing for yourself?

Sarah: I actually prefer developing for clients, erm. I prefer getting a brief and thinking ‘right, how can I best interpret this brief, and get the objectives that they want, er, they want to get out of this website, how can I do that in the best possible way?’ Whereas, I think that when you do stuff for yourself, you don’t necessarily write down a brief as strict as you’d get when a client is sending through something. So, I, I actually prefer developing for clients, I really like, I don’t, I really like doing all the end, getting to the end product with a client. I think I get more satisfaction out of that than I do when I’ve done it for myself, because I still look at it in a very critical point of view, I still think, ‘oh well, maybe I could make those buttons a slightly different hint of green and it will look better’; whereas, with client stuff I think it’s just all about decision making, I think you tend to make more decisive decisions with client work than you do with your own. You think of your own as an ever-ongoing project that you can forever tweak and make changes to, whereas with client stuff you, once it’s live, it’s pretty much. You might get to update…

Ryan: Yeah, it’s difficult to come back, isn’t it?

Sarah: Yeah. Exactly. So I much prefer developing for clients, when they’re nice clients!

Ryan: Yes, we only like the nice clients.

Sarah: Yes, we all like nice clients.

Ryan: But do you think personal development time is important, do you think it’s important to develop your own projects?

Sarah: Yeah, I do I think it’s important from the sense of being, when I personally do lots of my own stuff, I find that I tend to be a bit more, erm, creative, in the sense of I’ll try stuff that I might think ‘oh, that’ll look awful, I won’t bother doing that for a client site’, but I might try it and actually surprise myself and think ‘oh no, actually, that’s a really good technique to use’ or do something a bit different because you’re not constrained by time when you’re doing stuff for yourself, necessarily. But I think, I do think it’s really important to do your own, your own thing, because I think it’s also a learning curve, you might try out different systems to use, you might decide to learn something, you might decide to use something like, if you’ve never used WordPress, you might decide to go and bolt WordPress onto your site just to see how you get on with it, you might try different apps. I think it’s important, because it frees the mind to use other things that you might not necessarily get to use when you’re in an office environment or, or perhaps even day to day because you don’t have the time to learn it, so I do think it’s important, but I don’t think it’s the, er, the be all and end all of everything.

Ryan: I think, er, a good tie-in question, not specifically about developing for clients and, er, yourself. Erm, keeping it with blogs and stuff, do you allot yourself a, like, time to read your feeds and, er, things like that, and to keep up with them, because I’ve been so busy in the last two weeks, my feeds have just gone like – you know when Google Reader says ’1000+’ and that’s it, it’s just stopped counting, it’s gone ‘look man, give up on these feeds, you’ve passed a thousand.’

Paul: You need to declare feed bankruptcy, I think.

Sarah: I tend to do this really annoying thing, where if someone posts a good link on Twitter, I’ll open it up in a browser window in a tab, and then if someone else posts, I’ll open that in another browser tab, so I’ve got about 100 tabs open in Firefox that I never get round to, to looking at, which slows the whole thing down and end up having to then bookmark them in a little folder called ‘Interesting Links’, that I never get around to reading.

Ryan: When you look back, they’re four years old and completely out of date.

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: The shocking thing, because I do the research for the, the Boagworld news and push it all through the links, I probably churn through 150-200 feeds a day (Sarah: gasp), which is so many feeds that I haven’t got time to read them, which is shocking; I get so much information, so many good things that I’m pushing out to other people, that I just don’t have time to read them, there’s too much information.

Sarah: Do you skim-read them?

Paul: I do, I skim-read, I usually read the first few paragraphs, just to see what the article was about, clip out the interesting bits of text for the previews and then send it on it’s merry way out of Twitter and then I’ve written a function that, every time someone clicks a link on Twitter, it kind of lets me know, tracks back and so I can see, right, which… and I watch it, I’ve got live stats and streaming on one of the spare monitors, so as this link goes out onto Twitter, I can see it being read, so I can actually what’s actually what the people are reading, what’s been interesting that way, instead of me thinking ‘that’s genius, we’ll use that on the show’. It’s actually kind of crowd-sourcing information like this.

Sarah: Yeah, that’s a better way of doing it, isn’t it? It’s more productive.

Paul: Yeah, but I do the same, it’s like something I really want to read, I’ll open it in a tab and I’ve got the permatabs thing on Firefox, so I’ll set it so that I can’t delete it until I’ve read through it, but usually it just ends up there for weeks.

Ryan: I tag them in Delicious, so I’ve got like tutorials and stuff that I think ‘oh, that looks fantastic’ and I’ve got a ‘to try’ thing, which is slowly increasing in number and I never sit down and have a go through the tutorials or anything like that.

Paul: Yeah, I think the key is to follow a few key, key things and not try and follow too much information, and then just look at what everyone else around you, the people that you respect, in what they’re sending out and try not to get overwhelmed because there’s a lot of information out there.

Sarah: Dead right, there’s so many, it seems to be a new thing on Twitter to actually post those sort of links, day in, day out, which is really handy because there’s a lot of people who have a lot of good stuff on Twitter.

Paul: Oh twitter.com/boaglinks is the premier source of all this information, of course.

Sarah: Of course! (all laugh)

Ryan: Er, OK, so I think the final question to you, then Sarah, is, erm, what inspires you to pursue your personal projects?

Sarah: Erm, oh, that’s a difficult one. I kind of get inspired in strange places, when I came back from the Future of Web Design and Future of Web Apps, I kind of get inspired by other people, not necessarily the apps that they’re producing, or work that other people are producing, but I sort of feed off other people’s energy, strangely. If other people come away from something really, erm, excited about something, I tend to think ‘oh, yeah, that sounds like a good, like when Adobe Air came out, that was a kind of a buzz around that for a while and it got me thinking ‘um, what can you develop with that that would, you know, might be interesting to other people or that other, that other web designers might want to use?’ but that’s kind of what happened with my own app, Olive, it’s kind of on the backburner at the moment, but there was a problem that came up at work and it was coming up time and time again and I thought ‘there must be something out there that actually addresses this issue of, of erm, client management, so went around, couldn’t find anything and then ended up building it, and it was actually built more for me, rather than other people and when I sent it out to a few people, they really liked, and got into using it and, erm, it’s just kind of handy if you build something that’s, that’s great for you, but equally other people find interesting as well. It’s, erm, it’s a win-win, really. I mean, I use it all the time, and there’s other people who do as well, bu
t at the moment it’s, er, needs a lot of updating, because I’ve been so busy with client stuff, but maybe I should have put that first, but clients pay the bills unfortunately.

Ryan: Absolutely, absolutely. I think I, erm, I think I overthink things, so I think to myself ‘oh, I’d love, love for this to exist’ and then I think to myself ‘I could spend the next three years developing that’ and, and someone would do it better than me, you know and just finding time as well.

Paul: Yeah, I think it’s right what Sarah says, you’ve got to scratch your own itch, you’ve got to find something that you would want to use so much that you would spend that amount of time to build it, and then if it’s for you, it doesn’t really matter that much if no one else wants to use it because it does something that you want it to do.

Sarah: Exactly.

Paul: And it’s a learning process, you can choose any language. If you want to learn a new language, if you want to learn Django or Python or something, you could build it in that, just to learn that language, erm, and then send it out in the world, see if people use it.

Sarah: Exactly, that’s kind of what happened. I was learning quite a bit about Ruby at the time, because Olive, Olive’s built on the Ruby on Rails platform and it was so interesting just to get an insight into how different developing with Ruby is compared to PHP. That was just worth it in it’s own right, really because I find that I learn much better with real world examples rather than looking at a load of code. I find that if, if I ever get something like that, I have to take it apart, almost, and then try and work out how to put it all back together so that it works. I think I learn better by doing that and a lot of people do. If you going on to any of the tutorial sites now, there tends to be a lean towards developing an app or something small; I think on the Nettuts at the moment, website – do you guys know that one?

Ryan: Er, yes.

Paul: Yes, ah the Nettuts, oh yeah.

Sarah: Yeah, there’s a, there’s a sway towards actually building like login systems from scratch and things like that on there, where it’s actually showing you the code and then showing you how it works in real world situations which I think is really good, for me, I don’t know about you two, but I personally prefer picking stuff apart (laughs).

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. I usually start at the very lowest common denominator, like a user access system, and I’m learning CakePHP now which is, kind of a Ruby clone for PHP and instead of using their in-build methods which will do it all for you with build this, just write these classes and it’s like ‘No, it’s like the most basic thing I can do in this language, let me learn how to do it’, and I’ll learn that way.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah, that’s, I think when, erm, when I looked at using Ruby for, er, for Olive, I didn’t build it, it was built by a guy, a brilliant guy, Adam Cooke, but I was still really interested to know how it would work and how Ruby is different and the first thing I did was built a, erm, a basic recipe, sort of database thing with, it was off of a tutorial site and I think it’s great if it gives you just a little bit of insight into something that you might not have already realised or known about building your own stuff, then I think you have that sort of passion to go forward with it, you have that confidence to then think ‘oh, well I’ve done that tiny thing, maybe I can do something else with it. Whereas, if you’re doing it for clients, you don’t, you wouldn’t really venture into using another programming language that you weren’t comfortable with on a client site, unless you were a bit silly.

Ryan: Absolutely, absolutely. Paul told me a really funny thing, in between, er, when he told me he was learning CakePHP. He said, I’m trying to remember what it was that you told me, it was ‘if Ruby’s French, CakePHP is French with an English accent’

Paul: Yeah, its kind of the same, just not quite as elegant.

Ryan: Yeah, I thought that was fantastic, that was so fantastic, I made it into, I have some rotating quotes on my web-site, and that made it into my quotes, that was fantastic.

Much thanks goes to Simon Douglas for transcribing this interview so quickly!

Listeners Questions:

Is Using Off-The-Shelf Software Wrong?

Jon Writes:

I guess my question is about the use of off-the-shelf software. I must admit I feel slightly uncomfortable using it at all. As a decent sized agency of 9 people, with our own very capable developers, I can’t escape the nagging feeling that we are “cheating” slightly by using an off-the-shelf platform at all. Although we adhere strictly to licensing requirements, most of our customers do not know that their stores are powered by what is essentially a ready made system, which we then skin, configure and populate.

What are your views about off-the-shelf stuff and the pros and cons of using it on client work?

Thanks and keep up the good work!

I think the main source of your discomfort is the fact that your clients don’t know you are using off-the-shelf software for their projects, which raises the question why not?

Your clients have approached you to provide them with a service they cannot perform themselves. Whether that is building a system from scratch or integrating and customizing an third-party system to meet their needs, you are still the expert.

There are very powerful off-the-shelf e-commerce systems, blog engines and CMS’s that should be thought of as weapons in your arsenal rather than “cheating”. Explaining to your clients why you are going to use a particular system for their project can be hugely beneficial. It shows that you don’t want to waist their time and money re-inventing the wheel.

Therefore, the pro’s are:

It meets there project aims
You are experienced with the system
It’s supported by a third-party team of developers who are dedicated to that one product and includes a vast community of other users who support each other
It can be implemented in a shorter period of time than building from scratch (i.e. cheaper for the client all round)
It’s a tried and tested system (You could even give your client a list of other successful companies that are using it)
It is also more than likely that a third-party product that has been around for several years is a more reliable and robust system than the one you develop in a couple of months.

That said there are always inherent risks in using anything third-party, whether it be API’s, frameworks, libraries or software and I have a general rule of thumb that I try to always adhere
to:

Don’t implement something you don’t understand!

If it breaks, it costs you time and money to fix the problem, and that’s once you’ve diagnosed what that problem is. The longer it takes you to fix the higher the risk that your client is going to lose confidence in your ability to deliver.

So take the time to do some dissecting and learn how to use your tools as fully as you can prior to implementation.

How do you price and quote different projects?

Jamie who’s just started up his own web development company is having trouble working out how to price and quote different projects and wonders if we have any tips that we’ve found helpful when quoting for clients?

One of the hardest things when starting out, and even for established businesses is finding your feet with pricing. I think the biggest lesson I learnt is not to under-quote just to gain the business, even though you are in need of clients. It makes no business sense to work for peanuts, you’re better holding off for a client who respects the work you do and pays honestly for that work rather than being a design machine churning out work just to make ends meet.

The other important thing I learnt in my first year of business is, clients who barter with your prices are generally bad news. We’ve all heard it, “if you can do this one at x-amount we have plenty of other work in the pipeline we want to use you for” – while this sounds tempting, 9 times out of 10 the promise of the further work never comes off, even if it does they would normally expect further work at the “cheap” price they paid you before, as you accepted it so you must be happy to work for that right? Wrong.

I always find it helpful to ask the client for a ballpark figure prior to laying out the full proposal, this negates you wasting time putting together the proposal of cost plus terms and conditions only to find the client wants to build ebay on a budget of £300.

I also find ballpark figures helpful because I find it easier to provide the client with options, even if they have a relatively small budget there is normally still something you can do, even if it is very basic – but it gives you a starting block to explain if their budget was a bigger they could bolt on a CMS system or have a better shopping cart, then explain the benefits of those. You’d be suprised how much the budgets are then increased by.

It’s all about providing the client with the best solution for their project at the end of the day, and if you think the best solution would be bolting on Expression Engine or the like, you need to give the client the choice to do this and expand their budget if necessary rather than cut them out of the equation because of it, it’s all about educating the client.

158. Home

Posted in Classic shows on March 25, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: We share the highlights of SXSW, discuss home working, and interview Rob Borley about project management.

Podcast: Download (31.2MB)

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Housekeeping

Headscape still recruiting!

Headscape is still recruiting. We are looking for an enthusiastic, talented developer to join our team, working from of our offices in Hampshire. For more information see the job advertisement on Boagworld.

News and events

The best of SXSW

Well, SXSW is over and I am back in the UK. But what happened at the conference? What was the big news this year?

That is actually a hard question to answer. There is so much at SXSW that it is almost impossible to get a sense of everything that is going on. Even if you could attend every panel that isn’t always where the real action takes place.

The real conference often happens at the parties and in the corridors. In fact, more than one spontaneous panel was started via Twitter, thanks to official panels being full.

Panels this year ranged from the downright dull to all out flame wars! One that I unfortunately missed was "Is Spec Work Evil!". However, Marcus attended and tells me it was particularly fiery. Personally, I am very much against speculative work as I have said before. However, not everybody would agree and the panel seemed to reflect this diverse opinion.

One panel I did make was Paul Annett’s amazingly inspirational talk on Easter Eggs and design twists. The talk focused on the little things you can add to your site to make users go ‘oooo that’s clever’.

Too often I neglect such ‘bells and whistles’ in favour of usability and accessibility. Paul demonstrated how these different priorities can sit side by side without compromising each other. He showed some great examples including the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo and the vines on the Silverback website.

The final panel I want to mention is ‘Being a UX Team of One‘ by Leah Burley of Adaptive Path. To be honest the title of this one was a little misleading (at least from my perspective).

What I took away from this session was that design should not be a solitary activity, solely reliant on the creative inspiration of one individual. Leah seemed to be arguing for a more collaborative approach especially at the wireframe stage. She proposed that all of those involved in the project should sit down together and hammer out the wireframe designs.

This addressed two separate problems we have been having at Headscape…

The developers concerns at not being involved early enough in the process.
The question of who should do wireframing – the designer or the IA person.

Best of all Leah’s presentation was very pragmatic. She provided lots of practical approaches that encourage idea generation and collaboration. I highly recommend listening to the podcast of this when it is released.

Browser testing and IE6

In other news, there seems to have been a lot written about browsers this past week. Three stories in particular caught my eye…

.net Magazine seems to have hopped on the ‘dump IE6′ bandwagon – My opinion is the same as that of Jeremy Keith as expressed in last weeks show. It is not a matter of dropping IE6. We should instead being deciding whether we wish to offer it the same level of support as modern browsers. I am entirely in favour of providing IE6 with a basic stylesheet that avoids its shortcomings. However, I dislike the idea of dropping it entirely.
Microsoft has released SuperPreview this week that allows Windows users to test different versions of IE simultaneously. I have to say this looks like an impressive tool. It allows you to view IE6 and IE7 side by side. It also has many other tools that may also be useful. Support for IE8 and other browsers will follow and although it is currently in beta, I think it will quickly become an indispensable tool for Windows based web designers. Just a shame there is no mac support!
Finally, Sitepoint have written a brief outline of how to create the perfect browser testing suite. Ideally for those starting out it lists various online browser simulators, virtual machines and desktop browser emulators.

Browser testing continues to be a pain in the neck and I for one would be willing to pay for a decent way of streamlining this whole process. This is especially true now that IE8 has been officially released and we have another browser to add into the mix.

A simplicity case study

A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of simplifying your website. Well, this week Gerry McGovern has written the perfect case study to support the argument I was putting forward.

‘Removing poor quality content increases customer satisfaction‘ talks about how the Microsoft website consists of a staggering 10 millions pages. Of those pages 3 million have never been viewed!

The post goes on to explain how the Microsoft Office team took a different approach with their site by removing irrelevant pages. According to McGovern…

By weeding the garden, the top task pages became easier to find. But just as importantly it became harder to find a minor task page when you were looking for a top task page.

In short, removing pages reduced noise. Disturbing though it sounds, I think we could all learn something from Microsoft’s example.

An introduction to Microformats

My final post today comes from Richard Rutter’s blog. It is basically an introduction to Microformats aimed at the non-geek. He wrote the post because he recently found himself trying to explain microformats to a client and could not think of a good post that covered the subject from their perspective.

Personally, I am not sure it is necessary to tell a client you are implementing Microformats. The cost of adding them is so small and the benefits so hard to explain, that you maybe better off just doing it.

That said, this is an excellent post and if you are struggling to understand the point of Microformats, this is certainly worth reading.

Interview: Rob Borley on Project Management

Paul: So, joining me today is Mr. Rob Borley. Hello Rob.

Rob: Hi Paul, how are you doing?

Paul: Very well indeed. Good to have you on the show. It’s been a little while.

Rob: It has, It has. It’s weird hearing the show above you, um rather than being below.

Paul: Oh yes, because you sit upstairs, don’t you?

Rob: Indeed.

Paul: Do you actually hear it?

Rob: I do. It’s like have a little base bin ?

Paul: Awh. So, um, we have kind of been thinking for a little while that we need to get someone on the show to talk about project management. And the idea was we’d get some high profile web design project manager to come in and talk about web design project management. Then I realised, um, that I can’t actually think of any. You know, I really don’t know of any kind of web design project managers out there, other than obviously the people that work at Headscape.

Rob: Well, maybe there’s a gap in the market.

Paul: I think there is a gap in the market.

Rob: (unintelligible) celebrity project manager.

Paul: Well I think that’s somewhat of an oxymoron, but setting that aside, lets shift around a bit, yeah, so, um, so we thought, lets get you on the show. Um, now, you’re quite and interesting case because you started of as a techie.

Rob: Yes.

Paul: And you became a project manager.

Rob: Yes.

Paul: And, so, um, let’s start by talking about the role of project manager. How would you describe your core role? What is it that you do? I should know this I guess.

Rob: Well, you mean other than manage projects.

Paul: Ok, you just have to make a joke out of it. But you know what I’m getting at.

Rob: Yeah yeah. I mean, I guess, um, the main thing that we do is shovel shit, really. We deal with crap. You know, the main thing project manager would do is a filter between clients and the production team for the project. I mean, there are a couple of stages I guess. So you’ve got the planning part of the job, which is essentially working out what it is you need to do, um, making sure you got the results to do it, plotting a nice time line so they can all fit as far as having deadline. And then you’ve got the people said, because really project management is a people job. You need to know how to get the most out of all the people that are in your project team, um including the client. You need to include the client in your thinking, always. Yah, that’s essentially what we do.

Paul: Yah. It’s a people person thing. I always thought you were so charasmatic. Ok, so, I mean, I guess the question is, if you look at the kind of, if you look at Headscape, and the way that we’re organised, we’ve got four developers, four designers, and three project managers. I mean, that’s a lot of project managers. And, you know the question is, why, why have project mangers at all? Why couldn’t the designers and the developers do the job? Why couldn’t it be spread across multiple people? Justify you exsistance, Rob.

Rob: Yeah, this question kind of makes me nervous here. I feel like I’m re-interviewing for my own job. Not that I interviewed in the first place, but, I guess in one sense, if you were in a small project environment, you could almost get away with one person. If, you know, its a one person job, you could get away with them managing themselves for a limited amount of time. Um, but, as soon as you get beyond jobs which are more than one person, um, and go on for an extended period of time, you start needing to provide some glue to stick things together. You need someone whose got an overview of everything that’s going on. You know, the developers have got a very developer mindset about the way things happen. Designers are the same way, they know about the design stuff. Um, but actually translating what the client wants and feeding that into both areas and bring them together is what’s missing, if you don’t have a project manager.

Paul: So, to some degree, project management becomes necessary with scale. The bigger the projects, and the more complex the projects, then the more a need for a dedicated project manager.

Rob: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I guess the real role of a project manager in these situations is the facilitator. You’ve got all of these tools which are basically your resources, your developers, your designers, um, and you need to be able to enable them to work effectively together to produce what the end product is going to be.

Paul: So here’s a question that I didn’t pre-give you, in advance, which is always the best type. Why, why, why become a project manager? What made you – because you were heading up our technical development team, you were, you know, you were doing very well. Why did you feel the need to get involved in what you call shit shoveling?

Rob: Well, I think my main motivation was, Headscape was growing, and we started employing all of these younger, more dynamic, much more talented, better looking developers, that were basically going to show me up. So I figured that before I got shown in true light that I was going to need to move somewhere else. Um, no, well that’s partly true. Really, I think, its the people’s aspect that I’m really interested in. A good project manager is someone who is able to understand how his resources or how her resources work and how your clients work, and joining the two together. Um, while I quite like writing code really, I’m not passionate about it. So that side of it, you know, I reached as far as I wanted to go, and I really enjoy the people thing.

Paul: Ok. So what other, I mean, what other kind of characteristics do you think make a good project manager, obviously the people skills you talked about, what other, I mean if there are other people out there going well actually I’m not that passionate about coding, or I’m not that passionate about design, but I am passionate about the web, I do like the web design process, perhaps project management is the way I ought to be going. You know, what skills, what characteristics do they need, what personality traits do they need?

Rob: I think well, you need to be able to plan. Um, you know, planning is very very important. If you plan well, then your project will usually go well.

Paul: I like the cornification in that.

Rob: You have to be able to predict the future is helpful.

Paul: Yes.

Rob: A major part of what we de in the planning stages is assessing risk. You know, so, we’ve got what we’re starting with, we’ve got what we want to achieve, and we’ve got a time scale, now we need to work out what things might appear that are unforeseen, which are going to affect us reaching the time scale. So being able to foresee the future is helpful. Um, and so planning, being quite analytical and thorough. The logical background I have from being a programmer, a developer, is really helpful because you have to approach project management in a very analytical way, to make sure you don’t miss things. So there’s that side of it. And then there’s communication skills. You not only need to be able to communicate with a client affectively so they show that you understand what they want, um, and they understand where you are with the project, and they’re happy because a happy client makes everyone happy. But you also then need to communicate that with the various personalities in your team. You know, whether thats the developers locked up in a dark room with no social skills, or the crazy charismatic designers who…

Paul: You’ve just gone with stereotypes that so don’t apply. If I look at our team, no offense to our designers, they’re the ones that sit in the darkened room with their nose right pressed against the screen. And the developers are the ones that are crazy and never do any work.

Rob: (unintelligible) something about reading personalities. No, but you see my point. You’ve got these almost extremes, especially in the web, I guess, in the web world, you’ve got these extremes of personailities which somehow you need to be able to communicate with and put it all together and so, yeah, that’s an important skill. I think the third area, is to be quite relaxed about life. Because things will go wrong and do go wrong, it doesn’t matter how well you plan and how good you are at predicting the future. Stuff will appear that is completely unforeseen and will completely throw (unintelligible). And everyone gets really upset and people will shout at you and it goes a bit nuts. Um, and if you go nuts as well, you project team falls apart, because they look at you as the calm rudder in the storms of life. I can feel my other project manager buddies laughing at me, um, but if you’re calm and you can not get stressed at that but actually see, try and find a clear path through a very stressful situation, then really helps.

Paul: I would so be the worst project manager in the world. I’ve got the attention span of a newt, I’ve got no organisational abilities and I get stressed at everything. So overall, I think I’d fail.

Rob: Yeah, stick to web celeb.

Paul: Yes, I’ll come up with some other title that sounds good. Um, ok, so you talked about this really is, I can honestly say, a foreign area to me. Right? You talk about planning a project upfront. I’m not a planning person. Right? And there seems to be so many variables involved in a project and so much as you say, that can potentially go wrong. How do you plan it? I mean, you know, the kind of thing that you always talk about, when you talk about project management is endless gantt charts that seem to be outdated in about 5 minutes, sort of kicking a project off. How to you effectively plan a project?

Rob: Um, well, we do use a gantt. We always start a project with a gantt. And, um because it seems like thats what project managers are supposed to do, so we justify the time with a gantt. Um, but you do need, um, I think assessing risk is something that is vital in successful project management. Its something that we’ve been doing at Headscape, um, increasingly more over the last year or so otherwise this need to actually spend time highlighting what could actually go wrong here. So, you look at, I’m not going to be able to think of any examples now, but a particular, let’s say you building a shop or something. So potential things which could delay that project would be: the client not getting around to telling you what the products are on the shelf and content population is a big risk on meeting a project deadline, because it is out of your control. So, its like, I need the content by this date, and he needs to put the content in by X date. If the client doesn’t do it, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Paul: I’m guessing integration must always be a big risk. Integrating with third party applications.

Rob: Exactly, so if you’ve got some sort of third party database or a web service you’ve got to pull in, something that you’ve done a bit before, but you don’t know anything about, that’s a risk. Because you can guesstimate what’s going to happen, but its unforeseen. And so, the trick is basically, to find all the tasks that have these risks and then multiply (unintelligible) an hour by some random number. And then make the rest up as you go along.

Paul: So what about once the project gets going, how, what techniques and tools maybe do you use for monitoring and controlling the process and trying to keep on top of everything.

Rob: Yeah, I mean, there are lots of tools out there, obviously, lots of funky web-based ones, um, there is no substitute for talking to you team. Um, trying to (unintelligible) email or basecamp or something is impossibly without talking to you team. So, communicate. It’s a big part of what we do. You have to talk to the people doing the work, you have to talk to the clients, um you have to keep the lines of communication open. Um, but as far as actually keeping track of what’s going on, we do use basecamp, um which is great for managing lists, basically, you manage lists. So from our gantt shell, we’ll break it up into a series of tasks if you like, wide areas, um, and then, (unintelligible) ask people to add comments to them and take them off and then we’ve got kind of an overview of where our project is. Um, and hopefully from there, and when we’ve got the gant shell, we’ve got some dates, some milestones and reminders like you should have done this by then, um and so, you use that to kind of keep track of where you are.

Paul: Cool. What about, so that’s kind of dealing with the internal side of things. What about when it comes to the client, I mean, you talked about, you said earlier, a happy client makes everybody happy kind of thing. So what makes a client happy? What are the things that really, or perhaps turn it around the other way, what are the things that really piss of a client and where can it really go wrong?

Rob: This is really where the people side of it really comes in because every client is different. Some clients want you to talk to them for five hours a day, hold their hand, you know, spoon feed them, and some clients just want to know when it’s finished. So initially, when you’re kind of trying to assess your project team, if you like, your resources and what you’ve got, assessing the personality of your client early on, will really put you in a good place. Um, but, I guess, general principles, if you’re honest, it helps. Um, so, be realistic about what you’re telling your client is going to happen. Don’t promise the Earth by yesterday. Because then you won’t deliver and then they’ll get upset. If there’s going to be a problem, if things have slipped for some unknown reason, then tell them as soon as you know. Tell them as quickly as you possibly can. Um, manage their expectations is kind of the phrase that we use a lot. You gotta manage you clients expectations so that they’re not expecting something that you can’t deliver. And um, and then that limits the amount of upsetness that they get.

Paul: Slippage is a big one, isn’t it? This kinda whole area of things like, you know problems you kinda face, things, like slippage, scope creep, non-delivery, I mean, how do you have any kind of broad techniques for dealing with these kinds of things, or is it just kinda communications thing again.

Rob: It’s mainly I think a communication thing again. Um, part of the planning stage is trying to asses these risks and so you try and build in contingency to cope with those, and if you’re building enough contingency, you deliver the project early and that makes everyone really happy, even if its a long project, you deliver it early, you’ve exceeded their expectation also. Um, so I think, if somethings going to slip, I think you should say you’ve got to be honest. Sometimes things are just out of your control, so you’re two weeks before the end of a project, you in the middle of snagging, your lead developer goes down with appendicitis. There’s nothing you can do about that, and so you just need to communicate with the client and hope they take it well.

Paul: So wishing everything works out, I’m loving that approach. Ok, so, um, let’s finish of with a piece of generic advice. Either people starting out in project management or those that have had project management foisted upon them. You know, whats the kind of one piece of advice that you would leave for people?

Rob: Get to know your team. I think that’s the main thing I would say. Um, its kind of like, when you drive you car, you’re environment is a very organic, dynamic thing, you know what it really what’s going to happen and the only thing you’ve got to get you through it is that you understand you car. You know almost instinctively how it works, how to drive it it, if you get to that situation with your team, then whatever the project throws at you, you kind of, you can deal with it. If you understand how you client is going to react to a certain situtation, you can intincfully deal with it. And it keeps the stress levels low. You need to find ways of managing your stress levels.

Paul: There you go, that’s great advice. Thank you vert much for that, it was wonderful. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Rob: My pleasure.

Thanks goes to Meredith Marsh for transcibing this interview.

Feature: Home Working

I was recently contacted by a friend of mine Marieke Guy about writing a guest post for her blog on remote working.

I have been working at home for over 7 years now and am a great believer in the benefits. However when I actually sat down to write the post, I realised just how long it has taken me to find the right way of working.

As a large number of people who listen to this podcast work from home, I thought I would share my experiences to date and my hopes of where remote working will take me in the future.

The reality of home working

Posted in Mobile, Working in web design on March 16, 2009 by Paul Boag

An increasing number of people are trading in the cubicle for home working. However, is home working really everything it is cracked up to be? I share what I have discovered after 7 years of home working.

Like many people starting a new business, we begun Headscape working from home. It was a great way to keep costs low and ensure those long hours required when starting a business were more bearable. However the real appeal of home working, was the feeling it provided more flexibility.

The dream becomes a nightmare

To begin with it felt like being set free. I could work in my pyjamas, no longer worry about day time deliveries and get to see my new born son whenever I wanted. Unfortunately, like everything, the honeymoon period eventually wore off.

It did not take long for the presence of my new born child to turn from a blessing to a curse. His constant crying made work difficult and my loud conference calls often brought the wrath of my wife because they disturbed ‘nap time’.

I also found myself craving human interaction. Although my wife and son were around, I found I could go days (or in some cases even longer) without seeing another human sole. In fact there was a period of time when I rarely left the house.

Things weren’t much better when friends and family did come to visit. They seemed unable to grasp that I was at work and I suffered from constant interruptions.

Suffering from a lack of self control

However the biggest problem with my new found freedom was that it required a lot of self control. Many people suffer from a lack motivation when they start home working. They become get distracted by day time TV or making ‘yet another cup of tea’. However, I suffered from the opposite problem.

With work so easily accessible and a new business to worry about I found myself constantly drawn back into the office. For a considerable time all I did in my life was work and sleep. It was damaging to both myself and my relationship with the family. Something had to change.

What didn’t work

I decided that what I missed was the structure of office life. I therefore decided to recreate this structure at home. I started work at 9AM and finished at 5.30PM (at least that was the theory). I even dressed for work and at the end of the business day got changed into my casual clothes.

I set rigid boundaries for friends and family too. While I was at work I was off limits and simply would not interact with others. However, I did try and overcome my feels of isolation by experimenting with a plethora of communication tools. My aim was to enable better communication with other members of Headscape.

However ultimately all of these techniques failed. They failed to acknowledge the very nature of home working and left me with the worst aspects of both home and office.

I became increasingly irritable with family, annoyed by the constant interruptions created by the comms tools I had put in place, and trapped by the rigid routine of the 9 to 5.

The secret to home working

At this point you probably suspect I return to office life. However, that is not the case. In fact where most of Headscape now work in an office, I am one of the few hold outs who refuse to give up home working. I love it. It just took me a while to work out how to make it work.

The secret to home working is finding a balance. You need to put boundaries in place that ensure you strike the right work/home balance. However you must also ensure those ‘rules’ are not so restrictive they suck the pleasure out of home working.

Take for example working hours. I required boundaries. On one hand I needed to limit the hours I worked. However, I also had to overcome the guilt I felt when I believed I wasn’t working hard enough.

The answer wasn’t working 9AM to 5PM. This simply imposed an office model on a home environment. Rather I started tracking my time. Each day I work an 8 hour day. However rarely is that in normal business hours.

I tend to start around 9ish, but as anybody who follows me on Twitter knows I often take a nap in the afternoon. This suits my body clock and takes full advantage of my home working environment.

I also feel free to stop when friends or family come around. I often go for coffee or even see a movie with my wife. I then make up the time in evenings or weekends. Because I track the time, I do not need to feel guilty about these distractions.

I know what you are thinking- what if one of my colleagues needs something from me when I am out? Well, I always ensure I am instantly contactable. I have my iphone and will always answer it even if that means walking out of the movie. Also, I normally carry my laptop and 3G modem so I can act on things immediately if they are urgent.

Of course, I am not naive. If you work in customer support or as part of a closely knit team then this would not be possible. However if you do, then home working is probably not ideal anyway.

I think that is the problem with a lot of home working articles. They fail to take into account the huge variety of factors that can affect how you work from home. It is impossible to tell anybody how they should work from home because…

We all have different characters
We all have different job requirements
We all work in different home working environments

That said, I do think there is at least some advice I can give in regards to working environment.

Your working environment

When I first started home working we converted our dining room into an office. I did at least get one thing right. I realised the importance of having a dedicated working environment. You cannot work from your kitchen table when the room is also being used by the family. It just doesn’t work.

However, what I got wrong was the room I picked. Our dinning room was right in the middle of our house, between the kitchen and living room. Only a partition wall divided it from the living room and so I could hear everything happening in the house and vice versa.

Now my office is a converted garage adjoining the house. Its only link is through a heavy fire door and utility room. It is essentially a separate area exclusively for my work.

Pick your working environment carefully. Ensure you have a room away from the rest of the house. It will make a world of difference. Also, spend time and money to ensure it is as nice a place to work as possible. Lots of daylight is the key for me. That and nice furniture. If you don’t make your home office a nice place to work, it will become a prison you learn to hate.

Of course, no matter how nice your home office it will eventually drive you crazy. When you work and live in one place, you eventually feel the need to get out. That is where I am grateful we have a company office too. I have found myself really enjoying the change of environment and the opportunity to speak to real live human beings!

If you don’t have an office, then try working from a coffee shop or even break free from the office model entirely.

Beyond the office

While most companies are considering allowing their employees to home work I am beginning to experiment with leaving the idea of an office behind entirely.

The realisation that there is no need for me to be constrained by any kind of office first struck me when reading ‘The 4 Hour Work Week‘. Although there is a lot in that book I disagree with, I do think it gets one thing right – most of the work we do does not need to be constrained to a particular location.

Take for example this post. I am currently flying at 30,000 feet over the Atlantic on my way to SXSW. I can still blog. In fact Dave and Craig (two of our developers at Headscape) are sitting in front of me installing .net on a mac and Marcus is sitting beside me building a wireframe. As long as we have a computer, we can work anywhere.

This is even easier when I am on the ground! For £15 per month I have a 3G modem that allows me web access too. Combined with my iphone and laptop, I have a complete mobile office. I could work from anywhere.

Of course this approach is not without its challenges. My modem may give me web access in the UK, but using it abroad is expensive. That said, there are a growing number of wifi spots internationally so it is a problem that is diminishing.

As with home working the more significant barrier is a mental one. In the same way I had problems working out how best to work from home, I am also having problems knowing the best approach while travelling.

Over the summer I did an experiment in ‘road’ working when I went on holiday to the Highlands of Scotland with the family. I took a week’s holiday and decided to work for a week too, as an experiment. I have to say it didn’t go well. The temptations of the great outdoors and family fun was just too great. I did my weeks work but only just and it was not a pleasurable experience.

That said, I know of others who have got it working for them. I just need to find the right way for me. Perhaps I should get up early but stop after lunch. Perhaps I should take a long siesta in the middle of the day and work later into the evening. The possibilities are endless and one of them will strike the right balance between working and living the life I want to live.

What I am convinced of is that mobile computing has opened up limitless opportunities to work where we want and how we want. All that is holding us back is the status quo and outdated ideologies.

If you recognise that the mobile web is important and you need help deciding on a strategy, then book a mobile consultancy clinic.

Book a consultancy clinic or contact Rob about a more in-depth review.

10 criteria for selecting a CMS

Posted in Development on March 5, 2009 by Paul Boag

Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly deﬁned set of requirements you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS?

I have written about content management systems before. I have highlighted the hidden costs of a CMS, explained the differentiators behind the feature list and even provided advice for CMS users. However, I have never asked what features you should be looking for in a content management systems. That is what I want to address here.

When I left home for University my mother taught me a valuable lesson. If you want to save money, never go grocery shopping when you are hungry and always write a list. If you don’t you will be tempted to buy things you do not need.

The same principle is true when it comes to selecting a content management system. Without a clearly defined set of requirements you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. Before you know it you will be buying an enterprise level system for tens of thousands of dollars when a free blogging tool would have done.

How then do you establish your list of requirements? Although your circumstances will vary there are ten areas that are particularly important.

1. Core functionality

When most people think of content management, they are thinking of the creation, deletion, editing and organizing of pages. They assume all content management systems do this and so take the functionality for granted. However that is not necessarily the case. There is also no guarantee that it is done in an intuitive fashion.

Not all blogging platforms for example allow the owner to manage and organize pages into a tree hierarchy. Instead the individual ‘posts’ are automatically organized by criteria such as date or category. In some situations this is perfectly adequate. In fact this limitation in functionality keeps the interface simple and easy to understand. However, in other circumstances the absence of this functionality can be frustrating.

Consider carefully the basic functionality you need. Even if you do not require the ability to structure and organize pages now, you may in the future. Be wary of any system that does not allow you to complete these core activities.

Also ask yourself how easy it is to complete these tasks. There are literally thousands of content management systems on the market, the majority of which offer the core functionality. However they vary hugely in usability. Alway look to test a system for usability before making a purchase.

The editor is one core feature worth particular attention.

2. The editor

The majority of content management systems have a WYSIWYG editor. Strangely this editor is often ill considered, despite the fact that it is the most used feature within the system.

The editor is the interface through which content is added and amended. Traditionally, it has also allowed the content provider to apply basic formatting such as the selection of fonts and colour. However more recently there has been a move away from this type of editor to something that reflects the principles of best practice.

The danger of traditional WYSIWYG editors is two fold. First, they give the content provider too much design control. They are able to customize the appearance of a page to such an extent that it could undermine the consistence of design and branding. Second, in order to achieve this level of design control the cms mixes design and content.

The new generation of editors take a different approach. The content provider uses the editor to markup headings, lists, links and other elements without dictating how they should appear.

Ensure your list of requirements include an editor that uses this approach and does not give content providers control over appearance. At the very least look for content management systems that allow the editor to be replaced with a more appropriate solution.

The editor should also be able to handle external assets including images and downloads. That brings us on to the management of these assets.

3. Managing assets

Managing images and files are badly handled by some cms packages. Issues of accessibility and ease of use can cause frustration with badly designed systems. Images in particular can cause problems. Ensure that the content management system you select forces content provider to add alt attributes to imagery. You may also want a cms that provides basic image editing tools such as crop, resize and rotate. However, finding such a cms can be a challenge.

Also consider how the content management system deals with uploading and attaching PDFs, Word documents and other similar files. How are they then displayed to users? What descriptions can be attached to the files and is the search capable of indexing them.

4. Search

Search is an important aspect of any site. Approximately half of users will start with search when looking for content. However, often the search functionality available in content management systems is inadequate.

Here are a few things to look for when assessing search functionality:

Freshness – How often does the search engine index your site? This is especially important if your site changes regularly.
Completeness – Does it index the entire content of each page? What about attached files such as PDFs, Word documents, Excel and Powerpoint?
Speed – Some search engines can take an age to return results. This is especially common on large sites.
Scope – Can you limit the scope of search to a particular section of the site or refine search results once returned?
Ranking – How does the search engine determine the ranking of results? Can this be customized either by the website owner or by the user?
Customization – Can you control how results are returned and customize the design?

The issue of customization is one that goes far beyond search.

5. Customization

I have been unfortunate enough to work with content management systems that are completely inflexible in their presentation.

The presentation of your content should not be dictated by technology. It is simply not necessary now that we have techniques for separating design and content. Unfortunately like web designers, many content management providers have failed to adopt best practice and their systems produce horrendous code. This places unreasonable constraints on design and seriously impacts accessibility.

You need a content management system that allows flexibility in the way content is returned and presented. For example can you return news stories in reverse chronological order? Can you display events on a calendar? Is it possible to extract the latest user comments and display them on the homepage? It is flexibility that makes a cms stand out.

Talking of user comments, it is worth mentioning all forms of user interactions.

6. User interaction

If you intend to gather user feedback, your cms must provide that functionality or allow third party plugins to do so. Equally, if you want a community on your site then you will require functionality such as chat, forums, comments and ratings.

As a minimum you will require the ability to post forms and collect the responses. How easy does the cms make this process? Can you customize the fields or does that require technical expertise? What about the results? Can you specify who they are emailed to? Can they be written to a database or outputted as an excel document? Consider the type of functionality that you will require and look for a cms that supports that.

Also ask what tools exist for communicating with your customers. Can you send email newsletters? Can recipients be organized into groups who are mailed individually? What about news feeds and RSS?

Finally consider how you want users to be managed. Do you need to reset passwords or set permissions? Do you need to be able to export user information into other systems?

But it is not just user permissions that may need managing. You also have to consider permissions for those editing the site.

7. Roles and permissions

As the number of content providers increase, you will want more control over who can edit what. For example, personnel should be able to post job advertisements but not add content to the homepage. This requires a content management system that supports permissions. Although implementation can vary, permissions normally allow you to specify whether users to edit specific pages or even entire sections of the site.

As the number of contributors grows still further you may require one individual to review the content being posted to ensure accuracy and consistent tone. Alternatively content might be inputed by a junior member of staff who requires the approval of somebody more senior before making that content live.

In both cases this requires a cms that supports multiple roles. This can be as simple as editors and approver, or complex allowing customized roles with different permissions.

Finally, enterprise level content management systems support entire workflows where a page update has to go through a series of checkpoints before being allowed to go live. These complex scenarios require the ability to roll back pages to a pervious version.

8. Versioning

Being able to revert to a previous version of a page allows you to quickly recover if something is posted by accident.

Some content management systems have complex versioning that allow you to rollback to a specific date. However, in most cases this is overkill. The most common use of versioning is simply to return to the last saved state.

Although this sounds like an indispensable feature, in my experience it is rarely used expect in complex workflow situations. That said, although versioning was once a enterprise level tool it is increasingly becoming available in most content management systems. This is also true of multi-site support.

9. Multiple site support

With more content management systems allowing you to run multiple websites from the same installation, I would recommend that this is a must-have feature.

Although you may not currently need to manage more than a single site, that could change. You may decide to launch a new site targeting a different audience.

Alternatively with the growth of the mobile web, you may create a separate site designed for mobile devices. Whatever the reason, having the flexibility to run multiple websites is important.

Another feature that you may not require immediately but could need in the future, is multilingual support.

10. Multilingual support

It is easy to dismiss the need to support multiple languages. Your site may be targeted specifically at the domestic market or you may sell a language specific product. However think twice before dismissing this requirement.

Even if your product is language specific, that could change. It is important that your cms can grow with your business and changing requirements.

Also just because you are targeting the domestic market does not mean you can ignore language. We live in a multicultural society where numerous languages are spoken. Being able to accommodate these differences provides a significant edge on your competition.

That said, do think through the ramifications of this requirement. Just because you have the ability to add multiple languages doesn’t mean you have the content. Too many of my clients have insisted on multilingual support and yet have never used it. They have failed to consider where they are going to get the content translated and how they intend to pay for it.

Conclusions

Features are an important part of the CMS selection process, but they are not everything. It is also important to consider issues like licensing, support, accessibility, security, training and much more.

I leave you with a word of warning – Don’t let your list of requirements become a wish list. Keep your requirements to a minimum, but at the same time keep an eye on the future. Its a fine line to walk. On one hand you don’t want to pay for functionality you never use. On the other, you do not want to be stuck with a content management system that no longer meets your needs.

This has been an extract from the Website Owners Manual - now available as an ebook and for preorder in print.

155. Attitude

Posted in Classic shows on March 4, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul asks if web designers have a bad attitude. Marcus talks about contracts and we take a look at working with browsers.

Podcast: Download (27.6MB)

Download this show.

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Housekeeping

I have a couple of pieces of Headscape news I would like to quickly mention.

First, Headscape has some office space we are looking to rent out. If you are looking for a small office in the Hampshire area and like the idea of working alongside us, then check out our video tour of the Barn.
Second, Headscape is also recruiting. We are looking for an enthusiastic, talented developer to join our team, working from of our offices in Hampshire. For more information see the job advertisement on Boagworld.

Finally, just a quick reminder to sign up to attend the live recording of Boagworld at SXSW. We would love to see you there.

News and events

For much more web design news follow boagLinks on twitter or signup for our RSS feed.

Atlas wows FOWA

FOWA Miami has been in full swing over the last week. The line up of speakers was impressive as always. However, judging by Twitter one session stole the show. That was the guys from 280 North showing off a new product called Atlas.

Atlas is built on Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-like applications that run in a web browser.

280 North have already demonstrated the power of Cappuccino with the release of 280 Slides, a browser based version of Keynote.

However, Atlas takes things to a whole new level. In essence it provides a GUI environment within your browser to build powerful desktop like applications. It allows you to build Cappuccino applications without writing code.

When you first watch their video demonstration it really blows your mind. I in no way want to take away from what they have achieved. However, after I got over the initial impact, I realised I had seen this before – It looks very much like Adobe Flex.

Now anybody who listens to my show knows I am not a huge fan of flash. However, I have to wonder if Flash is not better tool for building complex web applications. I can see no real advantage to building it in Cappuccino. In fact as Drew points out in ‘The cost of accessibility‘, Atlas throws up all kinds of accessibility considerations, even if you ignore the fact it is built on Javascript.

Watch the video of Atlas in action, read Drew’s post and then compare it to Flex. Once you are done, post your thoughts in the comments. I would love to hear what others think.

Safari 4 is out in beta

So while we still patiently wait for the arrival of IE8, Apple have gone ahead and released its first beta of Safari 4.

Available for both the PC and Mac, Safari 4 has some impressive UI improvements and a considerable bump in performance. Apple claim that their new browser is 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3.

When it comes to UI and features Safari 4 ‘borrows’ heavily from Firefox and Chrome. New enhancements include…

Top Sites, an attractive display of frequently visited pages
Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages
Cover Flow for history and bookmarks.
Tabs have been moved above the menu bar in a direct rip off of Chrome.
Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses
Smart Search Field, using Google Suggest
Full Page Zoom

For us web designers, Safari 4 brings 3 key benefits…

It is substantially faster especially for Javascript heavy websites
It is the first browser to pass ACID3 so its standards support should be excellent
It has built in web developers tools, which are essentially a rip off of Firebug.

Generally the browser has been well received, although I note that Andy Clarke has expressed some concerns about the UI, especially in regards to tabs. He wrote…

Tabs in a real-world filing cabinet don’t change size according to how many files you have. Don’t mess with the metaphor.

I can see where he is coming from and have to agree. However, most of Andy’s comments are minor niggles and overall this is an impressive improvement. For more personally, safari now stands head and shoulders above other browsers.

Cross browser testing

Although the arrival of Safari 4 is exciting, it does bring yet another browser to test on. Increasingly browser testing is becoming unbearable.

To make matters worse it is not always easy to run these browsers side by side. IE is famous for being terrible in this regards. However, it is not alone. Even running Safari 3 and 4 together takes some hacking. Fortunately a post this week entitled: ‘How to run Safari 4 beta and Safari 3 on the same mac’ explained how.

There are also a growing number of services that aid in the process of browser testing. As with everything on the web, the problem is finding them. Luckily a website called the Freelance Folder has brought 7 testing tools together in a handy list.

Some of the services are free, others are paid. Some provide screenshots while others allow you to navigate your site. All allow testing in most versions of modern browsers.

The list includes…

Read the whole post for reviews of each service listed above.

jQuery browser fixes

Unfortunately no amount of testing is going to make up for the shortcomings in browsers. Whether it is a lack of border-radius support in IE or Firefox failure to render text-shadows, every browser has its limitations. In fact there are quite a few things that it would be nice if any browser did.

Fortunately Javascript can help overcome some browser limitations and even enhance them where they all fall short.

Of course, the downside is that plugging these holes is a lot of work. That is unless somebody has already done it for you. That is why I was so excited when Stanton pointed out ‘15 jQuery Plugins to Fix and Beautify Browser Issues‘.

This post lists 15 jQuery plugins that provide some incredibly useful browser enhancements such as…

Rounded corners for IE
Get browsers to display columns of equal height
Cross browser text shadow
Fixed position footers
Preloading images
Fixing IE overflow problem
Increase the size of click targets
Vertically Center An Element

A word of warning – Using third party plugins is fine if they are coded well. However, use too many and they may conflict causing problems. Use with caution and with a light touch!

Feature: 7 Harsh Truths about running online communities

In ’10 harsh truths about corporate websites’ I highlighted some of the problems I perceive in how companies run their websites. However, many organisations are not content to simply run a website, they want to run an online community too. Read More

Listeners feedback:

Contracts and legal stuff

I went to have a look on the forum for a good question and found this posted by Dave:

I am in the process of sorting out contracts and legal stuff. I came across this article – http://24ways.org/2008/contract-killer – from 24 ways and Andy Clarke and I think it is a fantastic example of a contract which is well written and doesn’t sound too stiff (if you know what I mean). Does anyone else have any examples or tips when writing a contract.

Why have a contract in the first place?

Bearing in mind I have never actually had to refer to one of the hundreds of contracts Headscape has produced in the past seven years, this is a fair question.

The main reason is that it focuses both parties’ minds on the job and what is required to make that job happen. It’s a kind of comfort blanket too knowing that if anything does go wrong, there’s a bunch of stuff in place to help resolve it.

How do we do it?

We split all of our contracts into two separate documents: a ‘Statement of Work’ and ‘Terms and Conditions’.

The Statement of Work is simply a description of the project written in ‘standard’ English. Roughly speaking, it’s a more solid version of the original proposal replacing, for example, ‘We could design X’ with ‘Headscape will design X’. It covers tasks, responsibilities, testing, technologies, project management, timescales, pricing, payment milestones etc. Basically, it is a detailed outline of the project that could be compared to the ‘Schedule’ of some contracts.

We have a standard set of terms and conditions that ideally (from our point of view) just simply refer to the statement of work in question therefore binding our terms and conditions to that particular project.

Our terms and conditions are written using fairly legalistic terms. Though this can sometimes mean that our clients, who may not be versed in legalese, have to take advice on what we’re proposing, I can’t remember a single complaint. I guess what I’m saying is that this appears to be the norm and taking legal advice on any contract, written in plain English or legalese, has got to be a good idea.

I agree that legalese can by irritating. Although I can understand a fair amount of it, it has taken a long time for me to learn even the small amount that I do know.

I once had a lawyer tell me that, when he was attending a class at law school on the subject, the teacher said that legalese existed only to allow lawyers to charge the rates that they do. I think his tongue was in his cheek, but on reflection, this actually makes sense if you view legalese as a kind of legal code that takes years of study to master.

I’m not sure. I guess my only concern in producing a contract using layman’s terms is if it is dismissed in the event of a dispute.

Our terms and conditions include the following:

The date of the contract
Who the contract is between (actual legal entities)
Definition of terms
Obligations
Deliverables
Payment
IPR (who owns what, what they can do with it, and when)
Confidentiality
Liability (often the biggest sticking point)
Default
Termination
Communication
Governing Law (which country’s law applies)
Signatures of the parties (most important!)

It’s not a fight – be prepared to negotiate

It is quite rare that our terms and conditions come back with no amendments. We believe that responsibilities and liability are evenly balanced but often a client’s lawyer will disagree. A cynical person might say that they are looking for issues to justify their fee, but it is possible that a particular point may not be right for some clients.

For example, we include the line “The Contractor shall have the right to incorporate, in a readily viewable location, a credit and hypertext link in the Deliverables.” In other words we can have a ‘Web design by Headscape’ link on the site. Some clients object to this and, if so, don’t make a big deal out of it. Just go with it.

However, there are times when you will think certain amendments or additions to the contract are unfair. Be prepared to stick to your guns but make sure you explain why. If you’re in any doubt, take legal advice.

Some organisations will flatly refuse to sign our terms and conditions and insist that we use theirs. From our point of view this is not ideal because these terms and conditions are usually created for contractors that have absolutely nothing to do with web design. They often talk the physical delivery of deliverables and the like but, experience has suggested to me that these contracts, generally speaking, are all very similar. The only thing that we insist upon in these cases is that the statement of work is referenced in the client’s terms and conditions.

Make sure the damn thing is signed!

Bearing in mind the effort that is put into creating these documents, always make sure that they are signed. This sounds obvious but I have had the odd clients over the years that, to avoid their internal legal team, has given the ok on the documentation but always found an excuse not to sign it.

It’s easy to say ‘well, we’re getting paid’ in these situations but, if things go wrong, you will
not have a leg to stand on.

So, in summary, contracts are good for everyone and worth investing effort in them and make sure you take legal advice if you’re not sure what you’re a client is asking you to agree to.

Three secrets to simplicity

Posted in User experience on March 3, 2009 by Paul Boag

Many website owners damage their sites by continually adding features and content when they should be simplifying. In this post I reveal why that happens and how to simplify your website.

In my post ‘5 options when website budgets get slashed‘ I explained that many organisations waste money adding ever more functionality and content to their sites when they should be simplifying. Unfortunately it is much easier to add content than take it away. But why is that?

The 3 lures of complexity

In ‘10 harsh truths about corporate websites‘ I outlined 3 reasons why website owners shy away from removing content…

A fear of missing something – By putting everything online website owners believe they are giving users easy access to everything they need to know. Unfortunately, with so much available, it is hard to find anything.
A fear users will not understand – Whether it is a lack of confidence in their site or their audience, many website managers feel the need to provide endless instructions to users. Unfortunately, users never read this copy.
A desperate desire to convince – Many website managers are desperate to sell their product or communicate their message. Text becomes bloated with sales copy that actually conveys little valuable information.

However, I think there is more to it than that. First, there is a general laziness. It is easy to leave content online. It takes effort to remove it. Second (and more importantly) there is a desire to please users. If a user asks for a feature or piece of content, we feel obliged to provide it.

3 questions that encourage simplicity

Adding functionality requested by users is not always a good idea. You need to ask 3 questions…

How many people are asking for it? – If only a few people request a piece of functionality, there may not be the demand to justify the time and money.
Who is asking for it? – If it is not being requested by your primary audience then you should probably not be building it.
How will it affect others? – With new functionality comes complexity. Will that functionality confuse some users? Will it distract from your main call to action?

What then do you do if your site has become overly complex? How do you achieve simplicity?

3 steps to achieving simplicity

According to ‘The Laws of Simplicity‘ there are three practical ways you can simplify anything, including your site. These are:

Remove elements
Hide elements
Shrink elements

Let’s look at how these steps work in practice.

1. Remove

Headscape Website

The first step to simplifying your site is removing unnecessary content. This is by far the hardest step for the reasons I have outlined above. However, it is necessary as Steve Krug explains in his book ‘Don’t Make Me Think.’ He identifies two benefits of removing content…

It reduces the noise level of your site
It makes the useful content more prominent

Removing content really does make a difference. We applied these principles to our own website at headscape.co.uk and saw a significant increase in conversions (those visitors who request a quotation for our web design services) and some amazingly positive feedback on the site itself.

In fact we took the principle so much to heart that we went from a 40+ page site down to a single page! Of course, that kind of radical approach is not for every site. However, even removing some content can make a huge difference.

2. Hide

Unfortunately, it is not always possible to remove as much as you wish. Sometimes you need to keep content to serve secondary audiences. That is where hiding content comes in.

It is important to cater for secondary users, but you do not want their content to distract or confuse your main target audience. Instead of removing their content, you can hide it deeper within your site or within the interface itself.

Menu on the Wiltshire Farm Foods website

An example of this is a recent homepage redesign we completed for Wiltshire Farm Foods. Most of their sales come from 6 categories of meals. However, they also offer a number of other categories. On their old homepage the 6 main categories were lost among the other categories. Users felt overwhelmed by choice and sales were lost.

One option would have been to reduce the number of categories to focus on the 6 big sellers. However, this would upset a sizeable secondary audience. So instead, we hid some of the categories under a show more link. This meant that their secondary users could still be served, without overwhelming the primary audience.

3. Shrink

Finally, there are occasions when content can be neither removed or hidden. This is often because the content is of critical importance to a secondary audience and needs to accessed quickly. In such cases the content can be shrunk.

Take for example University websites. Their primary audience is almost always prospective students. However, they also cater for staff and existing students. These people need quick access to intranet tools such as the institutions address book. The solution is to add a small inconspicuous link on the homepage that takes them quickly to this content. By keeping the link small (shrunk) the site serves their needs without distracting or confusing the primary audience.

A similar approach was used on the Wiltshire Farm Foods new homepage. However in this case the content was actually shrunk.

Because of the elderly demographic it was important that we provided lots of help to new users. We therefore wanted to dedicate a substantial amount of homepage real estate to meet their needs as they arrived. Our solution was this…

WFF get started guide

Unfortunately this became distracting once the users were familiar with the site. It became a usability hurdle. One solution was to remove it. However, this would make it impossible for users to refer back to if they became stuck. The next option was to hide the content elsewhere (for example in the help section). However, previous usability studies of this demographic showed they develop ‘habits’ in the way they navigate. If we moved these links that they relied upon, it could prove confusing.

Our final solution was to shrink the content. So instead of moving or removing it we simply collapsed it…

WFF get started guide, collapsed

This meant the content continued to be accessible but did not become a distraction or take up too much real estate.

Conclusion

Although the ideal scenario is to remove content, it is also possible to simplify in other ways.

This should not be mistaken as an excuse to avoid removing content. However, you could use hiding and shrinking as the first step towards removing. If these techniques do not alienate your users, then it maybe appropriate to remove that content entirely.

Whatever the case, we should all be looking for ways to improve our sites by simplifying rather than adding more and more content.

154. Top Ten

Posted in Classic shows on February 25, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Relly Annett-Baker talks about good copywriting, Paul learns how to be a more efficient designer and we look at the ultimate website launch checklist.

Podcast: Download (31.8MB)

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Housekeeping

SXSW

Boagworld is doing loads of good stuff surrounding this years SXSW. The full details can be found here. However, the highlights are…

A live Boagworld show on Saturday 14th 6.30PM at the convention centre – With guests: Andy Budd, Daniel Burka, Joe Stump and Jeremy Keith. Please sign up on upcoming or follow via uStream.
The Great British Boozeup on Monday 16th at 7:30PM at Shakespeare’s Pub – An evening of great beer and an all British soundtrack. Again please sign up on upcoming.
Boagworld SXSW coverage – Instead of spamming both twitter and your RSS reader with content from SXSW, we are bring it all together on one handy streaming page.

So whether you are actually attending SXSW or not, hopefully there will be something for everybody.

News and events

The ultimate website launch checklist

Making a website live is a scary process. There is so much that could go wrong. However worse still, there is so much you could forget. When it comes to launching a website, you can’t afford to take chances.

Well, BOX UK has been compiling a website launch checklist that takes some of the risk out of the process. This list includes everything from validating your HTML to announcing the launch on Twitter.

If you are responsible for launching websites, then this post is a good starting point for your own checklist.

Mr Budd is on fire (not literally)

Normally when I write about the news, I focus on specific posts that have appeared over the last week. However, instead I want to draw your attention to Andy Budd.

In case you are one of the three people who haven’t heard of Mr Budd,let me give you a quick summary. Andy is a user experience specialist and founder of ClearLeft – an agency that does a mixture of web design work and training. Andy is also author of CSS Mastery, an excellent book that I highly recommend.

The reason I want to focus on Andy is because he has really started to churn out some superb posts recently. Although an accomplished author and speaker, Andy has written less on his blog over the past year or so. However, in this last week he has released two cracking posts.

The first is entitled "Don’t treat your website like a commodity" and focuses on how we approach the market. It warns against trying to artificially create a need for your site. Instead he suggests shaping your site around user requirements.

The second is entitled "Is your website like a leaky bucket?" and is in many ways a continuation of the previous post. In this one he warns against the mentality of continually driving new users to your site and instead encourages us to focus on retaining the users we already have.

With these kinds of quality post coming from Andy again, now is the time to add him to your RSS reader (if you have not already).

A win for the generalist

I am very much a jack of all trades and master of none. Others have accused me of ‘having enough knowledge to be dangerous’.

In the world of web design, specialists are the order of the day. As a result I am beginning to feel obsolete. However, perhaps that is a false perception.

If like me you are a generalist, then you may draw comfort from ‘Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design‘, a post on Boxes and Arrows. In the article they explain that if you want to build websites that score high in user satisfaction, you need a team with a good general understanding. In particular they wrote…

The more each team member understood the business goals, the user needs, and the capabilities and limitations of the IT environment "a holistic view" the more successful the project. In contrast, the more each team member was "siloed" into knowing just their piece of the whole, the less successful the project.

Now, the article does not apply that specialists are wrong. It merely points out that in order to build a successful website you need to see the bigger picture.

It goes on to identify 5 ways that you can ensure your team keeps this broad perspective. They are…

All team members conduct at least some user research
Team members participate in work and task flow workshops
Team members share and discuss information as a team
Team members prioritize information as a team
Team members design together in collaborative workshops

This is certainly something we have begun to take on board at Headscape and we would encourage you to do the same.

Interview: Relly Annett-Baker on Copywriting for the Web

Paul: OK, so joining me today is Relly Annett-Baker who is a copywriter over at poppycopy.co.uk. Hello Relly, how are you?

Relly: Hello, how are you?

Paul: So here we are, on the phone, after a false start.

Relly: I know, it’s good for an internet-based podcasting that we end up using the phone, but there you go. It’s reliable, I like it.

Paul: Yes, all that digital technology, it’s nothing but trouble. Good old analogue.

Relly: Yes, analogue beats everything.

Paul: OK, so we’ve got Relly on the show today to really talk us through some of the kind of fundamentals of copywriting, and copywriting specifically for the web and how we go about doing that. So, Relly, I guess the best thing to do is start with the absolute fundamentals here, and we’ll start by asking you what do you think makes good copy, how do you define good copy?

Relly: Erm, good copy starts with good writing, which sounds, you know, really obvious, but erm, really, unless your spelling and your grammar and your sense is not there, you’re not going to write good copy. So, that’s, you know, the start of it, so if you’re going to write copy, make sure you can write prose well, to begin with. Erm, beyond that, it’s then about… The difference between copy and normal writing is that you’re selling something, essentially, whether it’s a service or, er, an actual product, or, erm, even, you know, just an entire, just an idea. Erm, so, it’s about benefits, rather than specifications. A specification is, you know, what you put into your brochure when someone wants to know whether a dishwasher is going to fit in their kitchen. But, the benefits is much more about the time they’re going to save and be able to spend with their family, using your fantastic, very quick, very efficient dishwasher. Erm, and the other thing that good copy should do, above everything else, is entice a reader to investigate. Especially on the web, your copy has to earn it’s place; it has to earn an extra second of eyeballing, because people just scan on, we get so much information thrown at us, especially on the web, that your copy need to be clear enough that it can be easily understood and also enticing enough that someone wants to stick with you and find out more, rather than flick on to the next thing they can look at.

Paul: Umm. I mean, you talked there about "especially on the web", what do see as being the, kind of, primary differences between writing for the web and any other medium?

Relly: I guess the biggest difference is that print mediums are fixed, that’s why we have different editions of books or magazines that come out, whereas the web is fluid, so, the difference between wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and there are pros and cons for both of those mediums, erm, that they use, but mainly that you can alter things as you go, nothing’s ever sort of set down as "right, that’s what we said and we can never go back and change it". So, erm, the other thing is the web is used primarily for people that skim-read a lot of information and use it to gather information before they decide to go on and request a brochure or find out more about what it is that you’re offering. It’s usually the first point of contact for people looking up, so it needs to make a good first impression, erm, and as such it also needs to communicate what your company is like, what sort of, you know, erm, formalities you have, erm, how big you are, how small you are, and how you like to operate and convey that, er, which print very rarely needs to do, it’s often, by then, erm, when a print brochure comes into someone’s hands, they’re already aware of your brand and they’ve got a better idea of who you are.

Paul: Mmm, I mean, there’s the kind of one issue that often comes up with the differences between the print, er, printed medium and the web, is that, you know, that because people scan, copy on the web should be kept short. I mean, is that something that you would agree with? I know that I’ve seen, you know, some articles written on A List Apart written before, that say "no it’s not about the length of the copy, it’s about how engaging it is". So, I’m quite interested in your opinion on that.

Relly: Yeah, I would very much agree, that it’s much more about, erm, engagement rather than length. Often with print, you get told you have, you know, space for 250 words and that’s how long your copy has to be. With the web, your copy can be as long as it needs to be, but that’s not necessarily as long as you’d like it to be. But as long as you can keep people engaged and keep them with an interest to keep on reading, get more information about you, and then, er, essentially they can read 5000 words about you, but if they don’t press the button at the bottom that says "get in contact" or "ring us" or "do something", then that’s kind of all for naught. What you want is to, erm, your copy to be long enough to persuade someone that they want to take the next step and get in contact with you and make a, you know, make that step towards doing business with you.

Paul: Mmm, I mean you talk, you’ve talked a lot about engagement already, how do you go about engaging people as you write copy? What kind of tricks and techniques are there, or is it probably a lot more complicated than that?

Relly: (laughs) Erm, I wouldn’t say it was the sort of thing where there’s, erm, there’s one way to do it; there are different, different, erm, styles and it really depends on your audience. Erm, often when we think of copy we think directly of advertising, and when we think of advertising we think of billboards. Billboards have, literally, two seconds to engage you and fix a message in your head. So, they have to have a certain amount of shock-value, and that’s usually accompanied by a large image that ties that together. The web is a very different beast in that respect, in that you’re making a one-on-one relationship; you don’t have to talk to everyone in the street, you can concentrate on who you think your best customer is. You do research about you customers and your users, and then you write for them, and you write in a way that’s going to, erm, keep them reading. Erm, so it comes down to a lot of research about who you’re writing for.

Paul: Mmm, that’s really interesting, you talk about writing for a specific person or, er, a specific group of people, because, it sounds then like you guys suffer from the same problem that designers would suffer from, when a client turns around and says ‘our target audience is the general public’, and they won’t narrow it down any. So, er, is it fair to say that you’ve got the same need to prioritize audiences that a designer would have?

Relly: Absolutely, you cannot write something that is going to engage everyone all the time, you have to know who your audience is. Erm, and that often involves doing, you know, research that, erm, the clients themselves don’t necessarily take on as part of the need for copy, but, erm, often the product tells you what sort of copy you need to write. If you’re, erm, writing about a teddy-bear shop, it’s quite obvious that you’re not generally writing for a, sort of, you know, middle-aged, managerial businessman; you’re writing for either, erm, older women who collect them, or younger children and therefore you’re writing for parents. But when you get into services, it gets a bit more complicated and so you have to do more research about the people who make contact currently on the website, if there is an existing website, or, you know, what business they’re going for and who actually makes them, makes that next step, you know, and who predominantly makes up their sales; those are the people you should be writing for. I often say to, erm, to people who are writing, who are starting to write their own copy, to have a style guide and to practice that – try writing a letter to your best customer; obviously, you don’t have to send it, but, you know, as if you were going to address them, face to face, what would you talk about and how would you introduce your product, and what specifically would they be interested in about it. And once you’ve practised writing about your products in that manner, it feels difficult ‘coz it feels like you’re cutting off 50% of your potential audience, but if you can target on, you know, the 10% that make up your actual, erm, sellable audience, then your erm, your returns will be much higher.

Paul: Mmm, very interesting. I like the idea of getting people to practice by writing a letter. I can imagine that works very well. Let’s talk about, umm, some of the common mistakes when it comes to copywriting, ‘coz let’s face it, you know, the majority of websites aren’t, er, produced and written by, you know, er, trained copy-writers, or even (Relly laughs)… they’re either written by, erm, the designer when he gets completely fed up with waiting for content from the client, or it’s written by the website owner. Umm, in either case, you know, they’re not obviously as experienced as you, so I’m interested in some of the really bad mistakes you see coming up again and again.

Relly: Erm, the obvious one is when people take their brochure copy and just move that straight across to their website and say: "that’ll do, that’s perfect, that’s exactly what we want."

Paul: OK, we we always say that, why is that wrong?

Relly: Why is it wrong? Because, erm, your brochure should really be for when people have made contact with you and have an interest in your product. So then you can, you can work on selling them, you can, you can work on, er, getting past any of the objections that they might have, through a longer length of copy when they’re ready to address those issues, when they’ve already seen the positives. So, erm, your website should be… As an example, if you take, erm, say a hotel that’s, erm, setting itself up for events, or weddings, what a bride wants to see when she goes to the website is she obviously wants to see pictures of a lovely wedding, but she wants to know how the day is going to work for her, and why it’s going to be her, you know, perfect day. A bit further along the line, she wants to know how much glass hire is and how much it costs, you know, to have rooms in the hotel and she can be really direct in those. But, initially that first bit of copy needs to be one simple paragraph explaining why your hotel is absolutely perfect for her wedding day, as far as she’s concerned, the biggest day on the planet, and you have to make her feel she’s the most important person. Once she’s, once she feels like she wants to make the contact and book, the brochure can explain in far more detail what the liability insurance is, what the room size is; she needs to have a rough idea of these things, but they don’t need to be laid out for her, then and there.

Paul: Mmm, are there any other mistakes that you see quite a lot?

Relly: Yeah, people don’t revise or keep on top of their copy; so they kind of treat it like it’s been printed, and that’s it, they can’t ever go back and change it, or they feel they can only change it if they also change the design.

Paul: Yeah.

Relly: We’re starting to get past that a little now, erm, companies are getting a bit more used to the idea of blogs, and so they can keep updated in that respect. Erm, other mistakes people often end up writing for their client or their boss, rather than the actual audience, which goes back to, you know, what we were saying before, which is, you know, that’s a difficult one, everyone faces that where, you know, their boss says: "I think it should be like this", and if you know better, that’s, you know, that’s you having to then lay out why I think this works better because. Erm, but don’t, you know, be afraid to make the point that you are writing for the audience, the people that are going to buy and here are their needs and here are their requests, and this is how the copy has addressed that.

Paul: Umm.

Relly: And, I guess the other thing is that, erm, people (laughs), people who, er, don’t write very often, they fall into two categories, erm, especially with designers, this is so true, that designers either did art at school, because they wanted to get out of essay writing (Paul laughs) and therefore they haven’t written anything for a long time, and so they’re a bit rusty and they kind of need to maybe practice a bit before they lay something out and, you know, maybe hand it onto someone else and say: ‘does this make sense to you? Can you, can you read this out of context and understand, you know, where I’m going with it?’ Erm, I often talk about, erm, people using, er, text readers for the same thing; you know, I know they’re used in website design to check, erm, accessibility, that someone, you know is, er, able to have the text read to them and understand what’s going on they should be able to navigate around the website. It goes perfectly well for copy as well, copy is very much part of your navigation: it’s the information you’re imparting to that person. So that’s always a good way that, you know, if someone, if someone can read or be read the copy out of context and they get, you know, 70%, 80% of the idea of what’s going on, then you’re on a, you know, good track that way. Often you find that people, the other thing that happens is that people start writing and they get so excited about the fact that they’re writing, the prose just flows from them, like they were actually Lord Tennyson reincarnate (Paul laughs) and they come to the end and they’ve built up to a massive, dramatic conclusion (Paul laughs) about why their product is the best thing since sliced bread and actually that dramatic conclusion generally needs to be the opening statement, because it’s what catches hold of people and gets them to read onwards.

Paul: I mean is, I’m fascinated by this whole area of kind of trying to create a tone in your copy, er, because I’m not a copywriter, I write quite a lot, but in the sense of blog posts and things like that and so, whenever I’m writing, I’m writing in my own voice, if that makes sense. But, obviously when you’re writing for another site, when you’re trying to reach a very specific audience, when you’re writing within that tone of the website, that’s a very different kettle of fish and I’m interested in how you do that, how you go about setting a tone; how you go about sticking to a tone, you know, how do you do it? (laughs)

Relly: Ah, the creation of a style guide is very, that’s probably most important here. There are two things that I recommend when, umm, coming up with the, sort of the voice, the tone for a site, is to think about the persona of who that person is that’s writing, that’s especially true if you have multiple people who are writing as the same person, erm, often you find this now with companies that have begun to use Twitter streams and so on to communicate stuff and they they need to remain the same person, the, erm, NASA rockets do that very well, Discovery and the rest of them, they they’re able to communicate very well, both scientific facts and just, you know, prosaic information about the fact they’re bored of sitting on landing pads, launching pads and things like that and it’s quite nice because it’s able to communicate a human voice to something that essentially is a very complicated machine, erm, and the way that they’ve done that is to think: "well, if I, you know, it I was going to be a person talking about these experiences, what would I say?" and sometimes, you know, the most complicated, fascinating machine on earth, saying the most mundane things communicates more about their team that it could do than take a very long, scientific specification of what they were doing. So, it’s again going back to understanding your audience. NASA have understood that their audience on Twitter, they’re not space buffs, they’re people who are gererally interested, because most human beings are interested when a rocket goes up to space, it’s, you know, it’s an amazing thing, it doesn’t matter if you’re 6 years old, or 36 years old, it still seems, you know, astounding, that it happens. So, they’ve gone back and they’ve thought about, you know, how can we communicate to people every day and they treat the rockets as if they’re just people hanging around doing their jobs. just like everyone else uses Twitter. So, the first step is to understand your audience, and it takes a certain amount of, erm, it is quite cool to say but dissection, it is cutting out the people that you don’t want to talk to; people often know who their customers aren’t, even if they can’t quite focus on who their customers are and who their customers are becomes clearer with more and more research. Erm, a lot of what a copywriter does as research, right at the beginning, crosses over with information architecture, it’s a lot of looking at, erm, how best can we communicate these points and who really needs to know them and in what order? So you kind of, you go back and you assess, so this company is, erm, is selling er… they might be selling, we used dishwashers and washing machines earlier, so who’s the primary researcher and purchaser? It’s probably going to be, erm, it’s split probably 50-50 between female and male, as for the initial research, but they’re probably going to be above the age of 24, averagely; they’re probably going to own their own home and they might well have children and that gives you the sort of insight to the sort of family life that they have and what they, therefore, want to get out of that product. Erm, so then it’s erm, then it’s a case of looking at, I often go back then to erm, manufacturers, look how manufacturers’ websites work, how they describe their own products; what sort of visual advertising they’ve used to communicate these things and how that can be translated into words, what benefit are they selling with the visuals, often if I’ve been supplied visuals for the website, they can tie in together quite well. And then I create a persona, the person that is writing, you know, being the person who is writing for the website. So sometimes I’m a middle-aged man, sometimes I’m a teenage girl, sometimes, you know, I’m a cool, skating dude, it really, you know, it really depends on what, erm, angle I’m going for

Paul: Sure.

Relly: With the copy. I keep a swipe file, which is basically things that I take from magazines, from newspapers, from other advertising literature, from books, from articles, that I think has been written really well and I take it away and I say, I kind of take it apart and say: "what about that headline functions so well?" and "what about, what is it about this piece that talks so well to the audience that it’s that it’s going for?" that, erm, that’s especially good if, even if you’re not the target audience and you’re still engaged enough to read it; that’s, you know, often quite fascinating. One of my favourite places to, erm, take, er, hints and tips from, of all places, is the Daily Mail and the Sun (Paul laughs), believe it or not, because they are so good at putting across an emotive idea in very few words, there is nothing like a Sun headline for giving you a kick in the pants, for feeling, you know, and often you read it and you find yourself, erm, agreeing with the statement, out of hand, before you pull yourself back and go: "now hang on, no, hang on this is the Sun, I’m going to read this story first before I make up my own mind." (Paul chuckles) But, you know, they’re very good at doing that, and, erm, I mean it’s not ideal for everyone’s website, obviously, but to have the ability to do that, to take just a few words and make an emotive statement is really useful in copy, because what you want people to do, more than anything else, is feel that they must do something about getting hold of your product, they must find out more, they must buy it then and there, they must, you know, whatever is appropriate, you know, you’re not going to find many people who are going to one-click buy a conservatory so that’s not necessarily, you know, going to work so well, but you might well be able to get them to arrange to have someone to come round and measure for a conservatory and that’s the next step to getting them to do what you want them to do. Copy is all about behavioural management, essentially.

Paul: Yeah. I mean, it’s got a lot in common with design, you know. As I hear you talk, there’s so much overlap. I mean, but what’s so fascinating is that, you know, a client will spend a fortune on design and they will spend a lot of time and effort and forever express an opinion over look and feel and design, yet they don’t seem to want to invest money in writing good copy and they’ll say things like, you know: "content is king", yet they, there is this perception, I don’t know, is it a perception that they can do it themselves? Why isn’t it? Why is it so hard?

Relly: I don’t know. We, we poor copywriters, we are the Cinderella’s stepsisters of the web design world. Er, it’s especially true in web design, more than anywhere else that I’ve seen, erm, probably because the medium is that much newer, that, and it sprung out of interactivity, as opposed to, erm, books are about staid reading and advertising sprung from that; television and radio sit somewhere in the middle, but essentially it’s a written script, sometimes with pictures added. The web is a different medium altogether, it’s much more about doing, interacting and as more and more social media stuff springs up, you know, that’s more and more true and don’t get me started on the amount of companies that have got terrible facebook pages and so on. Erm, but again, it is that belief that it can be done by yourself; that’s not necessarily, you know, not true, you know, people can write their own copy, in the same way I can design a website – it might look like a dog’s dinner when I’m done, but I can do it. It depends, I can, I can start off, to turn it around, I know enough, I have enough of a little, you know, little amount of dangerous knowledge, to be able to put a blog up, design my own blog header in Photoshop and upload it and be able to update my blog day to day, but that doesn’t mean to say that I’m necessarily ready to design a site for a, you know, big multinational company that wants to sell direct from its website to multiple places around the world. The same goes with, erm, with copywriters. I think partly the reason that we get so little investment put in at the beginning of projects is that, erm, we’ve come to see creating a website as a visual thing, clients very often ask about how a site looks and they don’t care so much about how it works underneath, providing it works, which is the equivalent of asking a baker to bake an amazing cake and you get it delivered and it’s four tiers and it looks fantastic and it’s got these, you know, subtly crafted sugar-craft dancers on top and flowers trailing all around it and you cut it in half and it’s sawdust. And, you know, the copy very much does come under the sawdust category, we kind of get a bit left behind because everyone can write a bit and it doesn’t take that much, erm, knowledge to at least lay out something that makes sense, erm, I think it does kind of get neglected; erm, I often sort of say to people that, you know, that the copy is as much part of the navigation and the function of the site as anything you do with the menu buttons or whatever else, erm, and what we really need to do is to have designers… there are some designers who have the attitude that whatever happens after sign-off is no longer their concern, so the amount of sales that happen, whatever else, that’s not their problem, they’ve done their bit, they’ve designed a site, it works and it goes out. Whereas, really what we, what you’re then doing is designing for your client, erm, a very pretty picture-book of all their products, but that’s not necessarily a sales tool, so we need to look now much more at, erm, at websites as sales tools for companies and to people, you know.

Paul: So, I mean, where’s the line here, mind, because, umm, you know, I can imagine website owners sitting listening to this now going: "well, I mean she seems to be suggesting that we get a copywriter to write absolutely everything on our site", umm, but, you know, when you get into the realms of, you know, corporate blogs and things like that, I mean it’s going to cost a fortune, is it not, to get a copywriter involved at every stage. Where should a copywriter be involved, where shouldn’t they be involved, how do they fit in to the process?

Relly: Right, that’s a really good question. I don’t believe for one minute that you need to have, unless you have a site that need constant updating, you don’t need to have a content editor on-site all the time; in the same way that you don’t need to have a website designer on-site all the time, unless your website is constantly evolving. If you have a web team and your content changes a lot, then you might well want to think about getting a content editor in.

Paul: OK.

Relly: If you run an online shop and you change a few products a week, and you might introduce a few new products, er, via an email marketing, whatever, you might want to consider how much of that you want to give to a copywriter. If you’re updating a company blog and you’re sending, occasionally send out, erm, emails to old clients and invitations to new clients, you probably don’t need to get a copywriter, unless you feel it’s a better use of your time, and I think that it is the division a lot of the time, is that if you’re, if something really needs to sell, if it needs to make an impact, erm, I guess you wouldn’t find an advertising agency going ahead and taking on a billboard campaign, without getting a copywriter in, or their own in-house copywriter; it’s not going to be the managing director going: "well, we’ve got the artist to do this fantastic picture and we’ve bought all the advertising space, we’ve got a whole campaign rolled out, so I’d better think what we’re going to put on the, er, on the advert then." It just doesn’t work like that and that’s exactly, that should be exactly the same with your website. If you’re looking to launch a new campaign, if you’re selling something specifically, if it’s going to make a big difference to the way your company’s going to go, you want to get professionals in, and in this case it would probably be a copywriter would be the professional that you require. Erm, you know, you probably wouldn’t want to go and fiddle with your own plumbing, unless you have a very deep interest in DIY. It’s the same thing. Erm, but on the flipside of that, is that it’s, copywriting isn’t some arcane art that people can’t learn, in the same way that most people started learning web-design by sitting down in front of a computer, you know, bashing something out in Frontpage and going: "well, that kind of works", and then four years later cringing at what they’ve done. I think it’s very much the same for me, when I started writing copy and content, I was a radio producer and I have been responsible for some the worst chart hits in history (Paul laughs), you know, ascending to the chart because of the copy that I wrote, you know, to persuade people to buy the singles, you know, the competitions that we came up with, you know; it was my job, it paid my bills, buy I can’t say, you know, getting the cheeky girls to number 1 is my proudest achievement.

Paul: Oh dear.

Relly: And I was at least partly responsible for that (Paul laughs). I have to take my part in history on that one. Erm, you know, again it’s that thing, you know, anyone can go back and do it if they want to learn, you know, how to write copy. Just be aware that your first few attempts probably want someone to look through, but don’t be disheartened if you get to the end of it and think: "that’s not really what I wanted." You can always go halfway with a copywriter; I run workshops where I go into companies, talk to them about what their needs are, help them come up with a style guide, so they can say: ‘we’re going to write, it’s going from really simple stuff, like we’re going to have abbreviations and we’re not going to us the Oxford comma (Paul laughs), if that’s of any interest to any of you punctuation geeks out there, erm, right through to these are the sorts of people we’re addressing, these are there interests so we’re going to work these into this piece of copy, and, you know, I can then work with your staff members who will continue to write and then you’ve got, you know, a trained battalion of copywriters in-house ready to write things for you, on your behalf. And that’s often, you know, I often say to people that it’s not impossible to write copy, it just takes time to do it. As with anything else, it takes time to code a website well, properly and so that you can make a job out of it, it’s exactly the same with copywriting, but nothing stops you from building those skills up as you go.

Paul: That’s brilliant. That’s absolutely brilliant. It’s really good to hear a copywriter’s perspective on all of this stuff, because I don’t feel there’s enough really said about that part of the website and it’s been great to have you in on the show, Relly, and I really appreciate you taking the time.

Relly: Thank you very much.

Paul: So, thank you very much.

Relly: Thank you.

Thanks goes to Simon Douglas for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Being a more efficient designer

Adam from Wales has written in with an interesting question:

Adam: With the economy tanking and client’s squeezing budget, can you give us any tips about being more efficient so we can turn around projects quicker.

It is a good question and one that got me thinking about creativity and its relationship with productivity. I also thought a lot about myself and how I work. All of this eventually led to…

10 Tips for Efficient Design

7 Harsh Truths about running online communities

Posted in Site content on February 23, 2009 by Paul Boag

In ‘10 harsh truths about corporate websites‘ I highlighted some of the problems I perceive in how companies run their websites. However, many organisations are not content to simply run a website, they want to run an online community too.

Don’t get me wrong, I am excited to see organisations embracing the idea of community. I have been involved in running virtuals communities since 1996 and in 2004 I wrote about the business benefits of community. To this day I encourage Headscape’s clients to build relationships with their users.

A well run community can…

Drive traffic to your site
Generate a passionate, evangelistic users
Encourage repeat traffic
Help develop your products and services
Save you money

This is not a ‘rant’ against community, or even corporations running communities. It is an argument against the way they sometimes choose to do so. I continually see the same mistakes being made by organisations. It is time that they faced the harsh realities of running an online community.

1. Technology does not create community

When clients ask for help to build a community, they almost always talk in terms of technology. “We want to add a forum to our site” or “can you create a profile system”.

In ‘10 harsh truths about corporate websites‘ I write about how a CMS will not solve your content problems. In the same way a forum will not create a community.

Vanilla Website

Community is about people and relationships, not technology. The technology is the easy part. You can have a forum like Vanilla up and running in minutes, but it will take months of hard work to build a vibrant community.

If you implement the technology and just sit back then your community will fail. The technology merely allows you to engage with your community in the same way as a telephone lets you talk to your friends. It is a tool and nothing more.

2. Show some commitment

I have already said that building a community takes time, but it also takes commitment.

Too many website owners start communities only to give up when they do not see fast results. A community can take months to get off the ground and years before it shows real returns.

It also takes ongoing input. To make your community successful it must be nurtured on a daily basis. When a user posts, you need to replying promptly. Until your community is well established it will need monitoring multiple times a day.

You also need to demonstrate commitment to the individuals that make up your community. You need to take on board their input, address their concerns and encourage their contributions. You need to show you care.

3. Learn how to lead

As well as caring for your users, you also need to know how to lead them.

This is not leadership in the ‘managerial’ sense. These people are not obligated to listen to you or do what you say. You need to inspire, excite and encourage them.

Running a community requires you to be more like a politician or preacher than a manager. You need to mobilise people around a common cause and stamp your personality on the community.

Unfortunately there are few course that teach these kinds of skills. However, I would encourage you to look at great leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and even Barak Obama for inspiration. These men can teach you a lot about engaging with people and encourage others to follow your direction.

Photograph of Barak Obama

4. An antisocial community is your fault

As the leader of your community, your personality sets the tone. As a result if the community behaves in ways you do not want, then you only have yourself to blame.

I have seen many bloggers write about the negative comments they get on their posts. In most cases this is due to the tone they themselves strike in their writing. Although there are exceptions I believe that users will respond in the same voice you yourself set. If you are irreverent, then so will your users be. If you are rude, expect rude responses.

A good example of this is the social news website digg.com. Digg has developed a reputation for its ‘harsh and juvenile’ comments. I believe this comes from the leadership of founder Kevin Rose in his associated podcast Diggnation. This irreverent, comically and highly entertaining podcast has set a tone that has been carried across by users into the comments.

Diggnation Homepage

This is not a criticism of diggnation. Digg.com has become very successful because of their passionate community. It is merely an observation that you reap what you sow.

5. You need to swallow your pride

Another aspect to leading a community is the need to learn humility. No matter how well you run your community, you will mess up. When you do, how you respond is of crucial importance.

Because of the ‘distance’ that the web affords, people are often more critical than they would be face to face. Feelings are overstated and there is an inability to read the non-verbal signals we normally rely upon. This can often lead to confrontation and disagreement.

I have seen communities fail because the organisation alienated its community by responding badly to criticism.

If you want to run a successful community you must swallow your pride and never respond defensively to criticism. Instead acknowledge the comments and thank people for their honesty. Ask others what they think and hopefully they will come to your defence. If not, then you must seriously consider whether the criticism is valid. If it is then you need to admit your mistake and correct it.

By admitting you are wrong, it is possible to heal a relationship with your community and actually leave them even more enthusiastic about your brand than before.

flickr blog post - Sometimes we suck

6. Stop trying to control the message

If you work in marketing some of these points may make you feel uncomfortable. It feels messy and you do not have control over your message. Unfortunately that is the reality of community.

Community is not marketing in the traditional sense. It is not a broadcast medium, it is a dialogue with your users. Failing to grasp that will rip the heart from your community and force it underground.

I have seen unsuspecting companies experience a terrible backlash from a community simply fed up with being sold at rather than listened to. Users do not want a sales pitch or a feature list. They want the opportunity to feedback and a chance to help shape the future of the product or service they use.

Another tactic for controlling the message is to moderate. In extreme cases I have seen organisations moderate every single user contribution that appears on their site. However, I have also seen companies quietly remove negative comments made about their products and services. This is enormously counter productive because people feel censored and will go elsewhere to express their feelings.

That is the trouble with community, you simply cannot control it. If you do not allow it to flourish on your site and engage with it there, then it will pop up elsewhere where you have no control over what is written.

Adobe complaints on Get Satisfaction

7. Nobody likes to be alone

The final harsh truth I want to raise is that “users don’t want to be alone”. Too many organisations launch a forum with a plethora of topics and discussion areas only to have it lay dormant and unused. The reason – it appears empty, so what is the point of posting.

Before you can even consider adding community features to your site you need a critical mass of users that want to get involved. A lot of companies add community features not because users are asking for them but because management wants it. Communities like that rarely succeed.

Also there is a tendency to go straight for a forum. However, a forum requires a substantial number of users to work. Contributions can often become buried in some thread or topic and remain unanswered because it is never seen. If your community is small you may be better starting with comments, reviews or a mailing list. User contributions are much more likely to be noticed using these tools.

Finally, make sure you are seeding the discussion through new topics of your own. Asking lots of questions is a great way to stimulate discussion and prevent people from feeling like the only kid at the party.

Conclusions

After reading this you might feel that running a community is too much like hard work. You may decide not bother at all. However, that would be a mistake.

The ultimate harsh truth is that your users will be talking about your website, services and products, whether you want them to or not. The only question is whether you want to engage in that discussion.

10 tips for efficient design

Posted in Design, Mobile on February 19, 2009 by Paul Boag

Being a good designer is not always enough to survive hard economic times. You need to be efficient too.

I don’t want this to be another ‘recession’ post. Sure, being more efficient in the way we work as web designers, makes us more competitive and keeps us employed. However, that is not the only reason we should endeavour to ‘work smarter’.

Working as efficiently as possible brings other benefits too…

More time – The faster you can turn around work, the more time you have for personal projects, family and friends. I don’t know about you but this is a major motivator for me.
Better promotion prospects – It takes more than good design skills to be promoted. You need to demonstrate that you are proactive and efficient in the way you work. Management will value you more if you generate a higher return.
Increased profit – If you are a freelancer it is all about maximising profit. The smarter you work, the more money you earn. It’s that simple.

So how can you be more efficient and begin to work smarter? Here are 10 tips that will get you started.

1. Use snippets

Let’s start with the obvious technical stuff. First make sure you have a library of code snippets that can be easily reused. These could include Eric Meyers CSS Reset or your own code for dealing with common HTML content such as news listings or pagination.

These libraries of snippets provide two benefits. First, they save a lot of typing. However more importantly, they ensure consistency across projects. Because you are using the same code for each project, all of the IDs, classes and structure remain consistent. This will save a lot of time when trying to remember why you built something in a certain way or how it works.

2. Use a Javascript library

In a similar vein to snippets I would highly recommend you adopt a Javascript library. Personally, I am a huge fan of jQuery because it is designed for those familiar with CSS. It is also amazingly easy to learn and very lightweight.

Using a library like jQuery has proved a massive time saver for me. It has allowed me to avoid endlessly battling with browser inconsistencies (at least in Javascript!) and avoid reinventing the wheel.

jQuery (like most Javascript libraries) also supports a large number of plug-ins produced by third parties. These too can be a massive time saver. However, a word of warning – be careful using a plug-in you do not fully understand. The quality of plug-ins varies massively and if you discover a problem with one, you can waste many hours trying to fix it, if you do not understand how it works.

3. Configure your tools properly

Often in our haste to ‘get on with a project’ we fail to take the time to prepare properly. One example is in how our software is configured. We settle for working with tools ‘out of the box’ when some minor modifications could improve our efficiency.

Photoshop is a good example of this. It has all kinds of configuration options from keyboard shortcuts to palette layout. Take a few moments to set these up for your workflow, and you could save hours of unnecessary clicking over the long run.

Look at whatever tools you use to build websites and consider how their interface can be tweaked to your needs.

4. Have one system for tasks

For fear of reinforcing a stereotype, designers tend not to be the most organised people. Not only do we need to organise the structure of our software tools, we also need to do the same for our projects.

Fortunately, not all of us have to manage entire projects. However, we do all have tasks that need completing. How we organise those tasks can dramatically affect our efficiency.

A common mistake with task management is to have tasks spread across multiple places. Some tasks exist as emails, some in a todo list, still more in a notebook or on your mobile phone. The result is that things get overlooked.

In order to efficiently manage your tasks they need to be gathered into a single central location. For me that is a task organiser called Omnifocus, which syncs between my desktop and iPhone.

Tasks are still collected using multiple methods. However, once a day I transfer them to Omnifocus. If I attend a meeting and take physical notes that include tasks, I put the notebook into my in-tray until I can add the tasks to Omnifocus. If I receive an email with a task, I drag that email into Omnifocus. Ultimately everything ends up in Omnifocus.

By being this regimented about the way I organise tasks, I ensure nothing ever gets missed. I also avoid wasting time trying to track down the details of a task I have lost.

5. Embrace and manage admin

Part of the problem we face is that answering email and organising tasks feels like a waste of time. Its not ‘proper work’. This is especially true when the pressure is on and deadlines are tight. We arrive at work in the morning and launch into our projects without checking our task list. The result is that we prioritise the wrong work and miss deadlines.

I begin each day by doing two things. I answer and file all my emails (I always achieve inbox zero). I then review all of my tasks and identify the ones that I wish to complete that day.

However, I don’t stop there. I have designated admin time. Once I am done my morning review I close my tasks and email until lunchtime. I focus solely on work and avoid admin entirely. This prevents email and other admin from interrupting the flow of my production work. It keeps me focused.

6. Distractions must die

Of course it is not just email that distract us from work. There is instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, RSS and… lets face it… the entire internet!

Don’t misunderstand me, some distraction is good. I have a very short attention span and so if I work on a single thing for more than about 30-40 minutes I start to ‘zone out’. However, there is a difference between ‘having a break from work’ and ‘getting distracted’.

Every 40 minutes or so I will take a 5 minute break and fire up Tweetdeck or Google reader. What I try to avoid is keeping these applications permanently open (although with twitter I have to confess I often fail).

By leaving an application open that can distract you with notifications (‘You have a new tweet’, ‘You have mail’, etc.), you risk it interrupting your flow of work. These constant micro-interruptions make it hard to ‘get into the zone’.

7. Keep a tidy environment

Distractions extend beyond your PC as well. Your work environment can also have an impact on efficiently.

If you work from home, endeavour to keep your personal and work life separate. Ensure you can close the door on the rest of the house and that the rest of the family know not to interrupt. Also if possible, try to keep your working area separate from the rest of the house. A garage or loft are ideal. I used to work in a small room directly between our lounge and kitchen. It was impossible to focus on anything with the constant noise from the two rooms.

Pay attention to your desk as well. Keep it clean and uncluttered. This reduces distractions but also creates a better mental state conducive to work. Ensure your physical files and disks are easy to find. Knowing you took some notes that are in a notebook somewhere does not make them easy to find. This is especially true when your desk is three feet deep under paper work!

Personally I scan what notes and physical paper I can. What I have to keep in physical form, I file in a single filing cabinet organised alphabetically.

8. Avoid multi tasking

There is a myth that multi tasking makes you more efficient – it doesn’t! As designers we like to ‘flit’ from one thing to another. However, ultimately this is damaging to productivity. We need to learn to focus on a single task and follow it through to completion.

As I have already said, I find it hard to focus for any length of time. In order to help me focus I break my tasks down into smaller ones. That way I rarely have to do one thing for too long. Take this post for example. To write the whole thing from beginning to end would take a couple of hours. That is longer than I could focus for. So, in order to stop me getting distracted and jumping onto another task, I break it down. This post was made up of three tasks…

Once I complete one task, I switch to another project for a while. Once I have completed a task on that project I may switch back to this post.

Although this is a kind of multi-tasking, it is more structured and ensures I spend as long as my attention allows on each project. I do not simply drift between projects.

Depending on your character this might be too extremely. You may find it easy to concentrate for extended periods. However, if you struggle to concentrate, do not use multi-tasks as an excuse to be distracted.

9. Don’t do excessive hours

Another widely held myth of productivity is that the longer you work, the more you get done. After all, on face value this makes sense. However, I sincerely believe this is not true, especially if your job relies on you generating ideas and being creative.

Obviously we have to put the hours in, if we want to pay the bills. However, do not allow your boss or clients to force you into excessive hours. The occasional all-nighter is one thing, regular 12 hour days is another.

It is incredibly easy to get burnt out as a web designer. You are expected to continually be creative, as well as keeping up with one of the fasting moving sectors on the planet. Things are continually changing and evolving and it is a struggle to stay current.

Working long hours damages your capability to take on board new information and cripples creative thinking. Ensure you limit your hours and book regular holidays. Do not push yourself too hard or you will fail to deliver.

Finally, accept your natural cycle. When you are ‘in the zone’ work every hour God gives you. However, you must also accept that sometimes you need to just stop and rest. Don’t feel guilty about the days when you hardly do anything.

10. Communicate better

I would like to end this post with possibly the best efficiency tip of all – If you want to avoid wasting time, learn to communicate better.

So much of our time is wasted because of miscommunication and misunderstanding. How many times have you had to redo a design because you misunderstood the client or showed them work too late in the process.

Take the time to really engage with the client and understand their requirements. Make sure that you include them in the design process and show them work often and early.

Finally, use tools such as gallery sites, mood boards and sketches to ensure everybody has the same understanding and is working towards the same goal.

By effectively communicating with clients, you can potentially save days on each project that would have been wasted on reworks and amendments.

If you recognise that the mobile web is important and you need help deciding on a strategy, then book a mobile consultancy clinic.

Book a consultancy clinic or contact Rob about a more in-depth review.

152. War?

Posted in Classic shows on February 11, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Daniel Burka and Joe Stump from Digg discuss the supposed war between designers and developers. Paul talks about using twitter effectively and we ask ‘are you placing too much emphasis on your homepage?’

Podcast: Download (34.0MB)

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News and events

How to film video case studies

Increasingly your web strategy is about more than a website full of pretty pictures and well written copy. Video in particular is playing an increasing role, whether it is embedded in your website or shared via YouTube.

Video can be used in all kinds of ways from product demonstrations to viral marketing. However, a growing use for video is customer case studies.

This week 37 Signals have published a fascinating insight into how they created their customer case studies for Highrise. The article covers everything from…

How they chose who to interview
The way they shot the videos
What questions they asked
How they conducted the interviews
How they edited the videos
The time they spent preparing the whole thing

There is little written about producing quality videos and even less about customer case studies. Without a doubt these kinds of videos are extremely powerful and so it is great to read quality advice about their production.

Effective communication in web design

Smashing Magazine has posted an excellent article that I would highly recommend to all website owners. No, it is not my excellent Twitter article that I will cover later. It is actually an article entitled – Clear And Effective Communication In Web Design.

In essence it talks about how to communicate on the web through both copy and visuals. It is a comprehensive overview (if somewhat superficial) of all the key considerations of communicating effectively through your website.

The article focuses primarily on your website, largely ignoring broader communication issues. However it does tackle…

The different methods of communication – Images, text, titles, icons, design styling, colour, audio and visuals.
The challenges of clearly communicating – This includes the curse of too much copy, the need for personality and much more.
What you should be communicating – Your company vision, the websites offerings, the benefits to your users and calls to action.

It also nicely demonstrates how the design and copy work together to communicate your message. This is something I will be discussing with Jeffrey Zeldman in an upcoming show.

Do we place too much emphasis on the homepage?

Following on nicely from my recent post about where we invest our money, Christian Watson recently wrote about one of his clients who requested a homepage redesign.

In the article he writes…

Sure, I could refresh the colors and move some content around. But is this a good use of my time and her money when the home page represents 20-25% of page views?

It is a good question. Christian goes on to argue that we often place far too much emphasis on the homepage and that in fact it is little more than a gateway page to direct users to more important content.

He uses a nice analogy borrowed from Jared Spool. He compares the homepage with a hotel lobby…

When visitors arrive at your hotel, certainly they should find that the lobby represents the hotel favorably. It should be attractive, spacious, with elegant lighting, welcoming colors, and the odd feature here and there.

The lobby should make it easy for the visitor to orient themselves â€” to see where the front desk is and where the lifts are. It should make it easy for the guest to find out any important information at a glance â€” upcoming events or where the conference is being held.

However, hotels are ultimately judged by the quality of their rooms.

It is an excellent post that provides real food for thought.

Interview: Joe Stump & Daniel Burka on War Between Designers & Developers?

Paul: So I am really excited to have joining me today Daniel Burka and Joe Stump from Digg. Hello Guys

Daniel: Hello

Joe: Hey hey

Paul: I have had both of you on the show individually and Joe you were on not long ago were you really…

Joe: ermhh yes a couple of months ago maybe

Paul: What can I say, we cannot survive without you. So erm but I though lets bring the two of these wonderful people together and talk about designer,developer relationships and how the two of them get on together working at Digg. I mean I have to say this is just a rip off really isn’t it, it’s a rip of a panel you did. Was that Future of Web Design (FOWD) you did that panel?.

Daniel: Yes it was Future of Web Design in New York. I think we are rehashing the panel at South By South West (SXSW) this year so if anyone is there it would be awesome if you dropped by.

Paul: Excellent, I need to persuade you two to come along to the SXSW live Boagworld as well, but I will hassle of of air so that you can back out if you want to without committing yourself live in a interview.(Paul laughs). OK so lets kick off by talking about the designer and developer relationship and really I think that it strikes me there is a lot of mythology around this that you know designers and developers hate one another and I am not convinced it actually works like that in practice. When you guys did your panel at FOWD you actually were agreeing on a lot of points so I though we would start of by maybe highlighting some of the differences and then look at ways of working together er mm further down the line so lets talk about to begin with what you guys see as the main differences in outlook I guess between designers and developers. How do you look at the world in different ways, do you think? Maybe Joe do you want to kick us off. How do you think developers see the world differently to designers?.

Joe: Sure I think erh developers are definitely, their default kind of response erm is that they would rather, I always make the joke that coders by default are lazy, good coders are extremely lazy people that’s why they’re good coders because they want to automate as much of their lives as possible. Ermm so I think that erm developers tend to get a little complacent when it comes to the actual erm product sometimes because they are so busy and so interested in and so worried about the actual code or the more nerdy side of things you know like are we running the latest greatest versions of different softwares. Developers also tend to be a lot more interested in what the new hip nerdness is as opposed to what’s actually going to make the product better for users, you know so like I have been in product review meetings where people are like “well Why isn’t this new version of some strange bizarre open web specification that nobody has ever heard of ahead of some major forward user feature” . (laughs)

Paul: (laughs)

Joe: So ermm I think that that tends to be like a big difference. The designers you know it is their job to be curators of the website in my opinion and kind of move the user experience forward and often times developers don’t have a whole lot of interest in that. (laughs)

Daniel: On the flip side of that if we are both going to slag our own professions ermm I think designers are often you know pushing unrealistic goals. They are interested in building you know the perfect product and you know aiming straight for that instead of looking pragmatically at doing things in steps and figuring out what is technically possible and I think there is also a gap where designers can only see sometimes what features that they can view and don’t understand, don’t see the vision, of where developers can see you know amazing things they can you know do pro grammatically that designers just aren’t envisioning.

Paul: Yeah

Joe: I think that’s er is another key difference that I know that there is a lot of, there have been struggles and tensions between Daniel and I in the past over this idea of a holistic approach to design where where Daniel designs his vision and his vision is normally version 10.0 and I am looking at you know the technical roadmap and things that I need to do and like I am OK well lets talk about version 1.0 and then we can start talking about 2.0 like, developers are much more focused on an iterative process as far as releasing, you know like small chunks, reducing risk etc. etc. and designers tend to kind of like go well erm you know it is like I wanna build a pyramid it’s like great well how about first we start out by finding some limestone and then we work our way up to building a pyramid.

Daniel: So what you are saying is we have got a fantastic optimism. (laughing)

Joe: Yes

Daniel: But I think that’s partly it. Developers are very interested, as Joe was saying,in mitigating risk and in a lot of ways designers are very adverse to even thinking about risk and want to think about opportunity. So I think this is kind of the crux of the whole thing and what we are trying to talk about on that panel is that both of those views are super valuable and if you manage to find the right mix of those two things then you can develop a fantastic product that is both concerned about risk and pushes the boundaries of what is possible.

Paul: Mmmm I remember one point that came out from the presentation which is one that you made erm Joe which is about the dangers of if that mix is not right. It is always the designer that’s in front of the client or the boss or whatever ermm the kind of realism of the developer is kind of left out of the process and ideally the developer either needs to be involved in those kind of meetings or there needs to be a conversation that happens between the designer and the developer before anything is ever presented. Is that kind of, do you still feel like that is that still a valid point?.

Joe: Yeah, I feel that is a extremely valid point for two reasons erm and this is a discussion that Daniel and I just had yesterday in fact. The thing is as a developer the reason I want to be involved early on in the development or in the design and like development of the product phase you know when requirements are coming together and when you know the first kind of formations come out of the clays so to speak is because two reasons. One ermm and they all kind of come back to this same kind of problem, is that the designers and the product people don’t know the system, the actual bits and bytes that like you know go into making the product, as well as the developer like the data and the code and the actual systems and stuff like that and how they are put together. So Often times two things happen Daniel comes up with a design and there is like one small minute detail on the page that would require you know one of the largest computer farms in the world to calculate in real time. Whereas in lots and just as often as you know that happens where it is like Daniel I can’t calculate that number in any meaningful way on a regular basis so you gotta remove that. But just as often as that happens because of you know as a developer I have such like intrinsic knowledge of the relationships in the data and what data we are storing and stuff like that just as often I am like well why don’t we expose this data or do this and Daniel is like I did not know we could do that actually I totally would have done that if I had known that that was possible or feasible.

Daniel: Yeah and that’s, especially that side of things designers often hear the first part Joe is talking about, the you know well that is just not possible or more difficult than you think. Any designer that has worked with a developer has heard that aspect of it you know and that is of course very valuable but it is the other side of things that I think people fail to leverage most frequently is the ability of developers to see different patterns than you in the data and come up with those suggestions, you know it might still be your call whether or not that is a valuable thing for the user but just hearing these ideas coming out is is amazingly valuable. That has shaped a lot of Digg.

Paul: So would you say that is a kind of you know a common mistake that maybe designers make with developers that they don’t communicate enough with them ermm

Daniel: Absolutely

Paul: yeah

Daniel: Designers often see developers as mules its like I made this thing go build it and that is a bullshit attitude, its terrible.

Paul: mmmm what …

Daniel: Its not just designers either all product people have a tendency to do that. In some ways, as Joe was talking about developers being involved in the process, at Digg we’ve got a pretty good structure where design actually falls under the marketing team and in some ways I see design as a bridge between marketing and business development you know product interests and the development team. Because I am often sitting over here and I hear you know someone from business development or marketing throwing around an idea and I am like “I’m no developer but I have a good sense of what the developer sees as important and you’re talking crazy talk like that is going to be nuts” and they are about to go and pitch that to a potential partner and you know like every week I put the brakes on from that kind of thing I am like listen you need to talk to Joe you need to talk to a developer because that what you are talking about is going to be months of development and you are promising it to a partner in two weeks that’s nuts and so I like that in you in some ways the design team can often be a bridge between product marketing people and the technical teams.

Paul: Joe from your perspective what kind of, you know as your communicating with Daniel and other designers within digg looking back where do you think you’ve made mistakes in your relationship with designers?.

Joe: Ermm I mean the mistakes that I often make ,its a not even a mistake are I don’t wanna say are what we do are like flat out mistakes it’s just more ermm you know being a bit more reserved and not necessarily defaulting your answer to no. Err You know I think that Daniel often talks about how a natural tension between design and product and development is actually good for the product because you have eventually, as long as you can keep that at a good tension and not you know bad or where things are breaking but ermm I think often times developers are quick to say no. You know they will be sitting in a meeting and it is just immediately no I am not going to discuss that when in reality if they sat back and let the idea germinate you know they would, Its kinda weird because I have in a lot of meetings where things were, where the developers were like be oh my god that is an amazing product but we will never be able to build it and so it is like they want to build it but their default is to avoid risk so they say no. So a lot of the times when I talk with Daniel now and this is something I like quit doing I try not to say no unless it is just like blatantly in black and white no way that is possible kind of thing. I might let the idea germinate more I might no say no immediately I might want to go back and spend a couple of hours thinking about it if it is actually feasible because maybe you know. That’s what engineers love doing they love solving difficult problems and if you are saying no to difficult problems then you are failing at what your passion and hobby is. Ermm so I think that ..

Paul: There is also an aspect is there not of not just saying no but explaining why you are saying no so that the other party is kind of educated into the kind of problems you face so as Daniel said earlier that they can be the bridge to you know business development or whoever else.

Joe: Yeah absolutely, I am the king of analogies at this point ermm but the other thing that developers erhh, this is extremely common that they utterly fail at is that they think for some reason that they are like the target demographic of the product so they will come into a meeting and say this product will absolutely fail because it doesn’t have key binding so I can keyboard shortcuts it’s like nobody uses keyboard shortcuts like in the real world, they are all mice people like you know. It is stuff like that that a lot of the time developers are like “this will never work unless you have least 14 completely nerdy niche features in it” you know and I think developers too often you know they do that and that is just silly.

Daniel: Hey guys that’s been a special problem at digg,since we started of as the pure technology side so it was seen as by developers for developers and you know we have obviously branched out from there and now we have got other interests I want to make sure peoples mums can use the website and that’s you know certainly a , you make different choices based on that.

Paul: I mean it is very timely from my point of view to have this interview with you because on Friday we had a internal meeting in Headscape where we talked about all kinds of production things and one of the things that came out of the development team was this desire to be involved in the process more and err to have their say more and just to be included earlier. So I am quite interested in you know because obviously you guys have been working together for a long time what kind of practical advise would you give to a , maybe this is just a question for me and not for anyone else, but what kind of practical advise would you give for designers and developers working together within the organisation. How can that relationship work better?

Daniel: Yeah, absolutely involving your development team earlier in the process but that doesn’t necessarily mean sitting around brainstorming right at the beginning of a feature with them. I mean I try to sit down work out an idea get it 20% of the way there, you know work out some of the basic issues figure out what this thing really means what’s at the core of it you know it might be ten different features together but what are we actually trying to achieve with it right so at least get that far even throw down so basic wire frames or some really basic comps and then present it to the developers its like listen this isn’t just an idea I came up with you know last night I just want to spill my entire brain out in front of you it is something at least I have thought through you know I have put a few things through my brain and now here is this totally unformed, not totally unformed, slightly formed idea but it is not baked you know don’t wait until you have got it baked and then you are so disappointed when the development team says well that’s not possible or have you really though about this and you have got this complete package already made up in your mind but come to them with a least you know the kernel of the thought out idea and get them to poke holes in it. Get them to push it in other directions and show you what else you could be doing and then go back to the drawing board again.

Paul: What about from your point of view Joe?

Joe: Well yeah, So ermm I agree with Daniel in some sense on that I think it is crucial to before you take it to developers to formulate a cohesive problem or hypotheses. Like if you come to the developers with a half baked problem that you are trying to solve you are going to get like, they are just going to run wild with it and it is like you know difficult sometimes to keep developers focused when they get excited about a problem. So have a formulated problem that you know you have a small idea of how you are going to fix but not fully baked. The other thing too and this goes on both sides of the aisle it shouldn’t be get developers plural involved and it shouldn’t be get. like a lot when you are first germinating that idea and you haven’t really moved it forward start small and then continuously expose it to more and more people errmh because I find if you involve too many people early on in a the process whether it is designers, developers, product people things tend to , you tend to loose focus quickly and everyone wants you know it’s kind of like port barrel spending and major bills its like everyone wants to piggy back extra features and stuff and pet projects that they have wanted for so long into like some major new feature.

Daniel: It is just simple death by committee

Joe: Right

Paul: Yeah Yeah OK That’s interesting a little random question I remember going to a talk once where, and I can’t remember who it was who was giving it, where they suggested that errmh designers and developers swapped roles for a while. Where you try and sit in the other persons shoes and I was just interested whether you two had tried anything like that?

Joe: That would be disastrous for me. (laughs)

Daniel: I I mean I appreciate development roles and I am you know somewhat technical for a designer but yeah I know I have never done that but I have always worked so closely with the development team like at silverorange where I worked previously to digg there was only ten of us and I sat in a room with developers all the time. I worked in their code with them and worked on problems as a group so I think I, you know I have never worked in a place like say you worked in a big enterprise and your in this classic where designers are in one office and developers are in the other office and you toss stuff over the wall yes then I think that would hold value at least go and sit in the other office, go work in the other office for a few months just hear the other discussions that are going on because there are a totally different set of concerns a totally different set of values than what you are doing and if you don’t at least appreciate and understand that, and not just understand it so you know what you are fighting against but understand it to know what is important and how you can work with it then you know you would be really missing out.

Joe: I think I am ermhh I think I am kind of spoiled at Digg because you know I work with two of the webs brightest, you know Daniel and Mark Trammell as well so I actually push back on my developers pretty frequently where they you know we will leave a meeting and they are like I really really completely disagree with what Daniel or Mark are doing with the design and you know I tell them all the time like look you are not a designer and you definitely not at the level that those two are at and you sometimes have to defer to them and trust that they are doing their job and they are doing it well you know and ermhh I think developers don’t do that often enough they make these assumptions that you know the arty-farty designers are doing stupid shit again and that’s not the case. I mean they would not be especially where we are at at Digg and what not I mean Digg is able to be very picky with who they bring on and the people Daniel has brought in to design are extremely competent at what they do err so I am probably not qualified to answer that question because I am so spoiled at Digg but that is a common problem I see from developers where ermhh they don’t let the designers do their job and they try and be designers when in reality you know they do not have the experience or the expertise so.

Paul: Lets talk about conflict resolutions, sounds very grandiose but basically you know how do you go around resolving a situation where you know OK you kind of respect each others skills and you respect each others competencies but you know where some feature is suggested by Daniel and you know and you Daniel from your point of view it is absolutely core to what you are trying to achieve you know it is extremely important and then from a technical angle Joe it just seems incredibly complex and very very difficult. How is the eventual decision made as to whether that feature should be implemented and in what way it is implemented? How do you go about resolving that difference?.

Joe: Ermhh Well I mean I think as far as making the decision whether or not the feature makes it in, because there is actually two possibilities when it comes to the conflict resolution. Whether or not a feature actually makes it into the product and in what capacity does that feature make it into the product and I think in the former whether or not the feature actually makes into the product if Daniel comes to me and he’s resolute like this feature has to be in the product the feature is going to be in product. I am always going to defer to Daniel on on, if he feels that strongly and is that passionate about it you know and it is not something completely hare-brained like I want magic ponies to come flying out of the screen I am going to defer to his expertise on the fact that feature needs to be in the product. Where the conflict resolution comes into it is what capacity is that feature going to come into the product like a perfect example of I think of something where there has been we have had a recent discussion at Digg and where this has happened we have, and I talked about this probably in our last talk but, there are these little green badges on the digg buttons and they indicate one of your friends has dugg that story and when you hover over the digg button it shows like a little sample of the people that have dugg it. Ermhh So those were causing significant strain and problems with our systems and our code and on our databases so I came to Daniel and of course again as my risk aversion developer brain was coming to Daniel I was like Can we axe this feature until we can figure out how to like fix it. He was like “No” that feature cannot absolutely be axed and then we came to a resolution which was a short term solution until we can get a better solution in place where operations now have knobs they can dial down so the green badges don’t show up on stories older than 48hrs, they don’t show up on stories that have more than say 5 or 600 diggs and stuff like that. So the conflict resolution came in basically making trade-offs in how that feature is surfaced in works ermhh at our scale more often than not what that means is that Daniel has to give up the notion that everything is in real time. The feature will work it is just that it may take you know thirty seconds to a minute for an action to be distributed across the entire system, that is probably more how things are now at Digg so.

Paul: What about from your point Daniel, when do you back down over something and when do you keep pushing on it? How do you decide you know how serious Joe is about something and whether you should keep pushing or not?

Daniel: Right I mean it kind of comes down to you know when I am looking at the product I am not thinking of any one feature, I am thinking about the whole set and I want it all to work together and so you know I know I want to push out six different features this month and if I push and push Joe to do the one really hard one well that is going to affect the other five I wanted to get done. So any feature is tied to other features and it is also based on a time line if I want something done in a certain time line and that’s just not possible well then I have to start making compromises so you know you have to be realistic and then at the same time you have to realise developers work well with shame and so if you tell a developer well I bet a good developer could do that (All laugh) they will go back to their cube grumbling at you and figure out a more efficient way to do it.

Paul: OK. So now we are getting into the realms of how to manipulate each other.

Daniel: Absolutely.

Joe: That’s definitely err one that I agree does work but is not a trick you want to pull out of your bag too often.

Daniel: No it is the same with designers too, it is like I want to do this really complex thing, no way I can explain that to users in a way they will understand. “I thought you were good” arhh shit I will go back and try that again.

Paul: That is quite interesting what you just said there because so far we have talked very much about you know designers initiating features and that kind of stuff I mean are there situations where the developer is the one initiating features you know just said there a developer wanted to do something really cool and you said you couldn’t explain it. Does it run that way as well? or is it always the designer who drives first?.

Daniel: No Absolutely that happens at Digg, it happens sometimes at Digg so Joe yesterday sent me an email that had two big feature ideas in it. They may not be things we implement this month but maybe later on this year. I was looking at them and you know it is easy to disregard well he is a developer he does not understand what’s going on with the product but you look at the ideas and they are strong and they fit in with what we are doing and now I am trying to figure out you know how they make sense in the big picture I guess. So we have got a brilliant development team a lot of people over there with great ideas and we try to sit down, you know I guess Kevin has been doing those where we do meetings once a month I guess where developers if they have been working on a side project you know something they have always wanted to build into Digg they can present this at the Digg ideas meeting.

Paul: Ah OK

Daniel: A bunch of those products will make it into the full Digg I mean its awesome these brilliant people go and throw around crazy ideas and show you what is possible.

Joe: I think err yeah I mean I agree with that you definitely have, it is a two way street erm largely stuff comes from product at this point the Digg ideas meetings is definitely helping that you know open that up and kind of what I would call level that playing field a bit. But one of the things I think developers are in a in a unique position just like Daniel I work with people across the entire companies so I know initiatives that are going on in marketing I know initiatives that are going on in PR and biz dev etc. and you know if nothing else developers are very good about noticing and pointing out and discovering patterns and err a recent product that made it out that err was a developer initiated product was Digg dialogue because basically I noticed this common pattern where business development and Marketing and PR were setting up interviews and then like reaching out to people to like conduct interviews using the Digg engine kind of thing and I was why don’t we bake this into like a cohesive feature that’s turnkey because you know business development like Daniel was saying earlier lots of times they are just making these one off deals you know and they don’t really recognise when there is a product to be had there erm so that is another one that recently went out. It was like I recognised a pattern and baked this into something cohesive and move it forward.

Daniel: That is a good example of where we are being lazy some people want to do this one off thing over and over again and it is a bunch of work to don it each time well like we will just build a system to do it and we won’t have to do all the work every time. It was great.

Paul: OK that is really good lets leave then with one final question or one thing from each of you. Which is if you could give you know one piece of advice to either designers or developers on how to kind of interact with their counterpart what would that one piece of advice be?. Lets kick of with you Daniel what would be your one piece of advice to designers about dealing with developers?.

Daniel: My one piece of advice would be to see the big picture, you know aim for version 10 like we were talking about earlier and know what you want to build in the future but be realistic enough to back it up and build it in stages. You know waiting and building a feature over six months and eventually launching it is a terrible way to develop and it’s a terrible way to design having an idea of where you want to be in six months but realising in one month increments is so much better you’ll end up in a different place but at least you know where you are heading and you can adjust that goal as you go forward

Paul: Yeah. Brilliant. Joe what about you?

Joe: Ermhh I would say to the developers out there that there is different shades of no ermhh that you know there is the, the default should not always be no and remember what I said about the conflict resolution you should be deferring to the people that are experts in their field by default for the most part and to work on compromise in how the feature operates and make your concessions and have them make their concessions rather than just defaulting to saying no to the entire feature.

Daniel: And as a developer push to be involved early in the process, even at Digg we struggle with that a lot and as a designer I appreciate when developers want to be involved I want to hear their opinions you know it is fun to have them involved I hear all kinds of crazy stuff I never even considered that’s awesome.

Paul: Excellent. Thank you so much guys that was really good I appreciate you coming back on the show yet again. It was really good to get your perspectives together on that relationship because it is one a lot of people struggle with. So it is good to hear that it can work most of the time. Thanks for your time

Daniel: Thanks for having us on Paul

Joe: Bye

Thanks goes to Shaun Hare for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

With everybody from Britney to Obama now on Twitter it is safe to say the social networking platform has gone mainstream. But what does this mean for the service and how can we as website owners use it? Read More

10 harsh truths about corporate websites

Posted in Web strategy on February 11, 2009 by Paul Boag

We all make mistakes running our websites. However the nature of those mistakes varies. As your site and organisation grow, the mistakes begin to change. This post addresses common mistakes in larger organisations.

Most of the clients I work with at Headscape are larger organisations – Universities, large charities, public sector institutions and large companies.

Over the last 7 years I have noticed certain reassuring misconceptions within these organisations. The idea of this post is to dispel these illusions and encourage people to face the harsh reality.

The problem is that if you are reading this post you are probably already aware of these things. However, hopefully this article will be a useful tool for convincing others within your organisation.

Anyway, here are my 10 harsh truths about larger websites.

1. You need a separate web division

In most organisations I work with the website is managed by either the marketing or IT department. However, this inevitably leads to a turf war and the site becoming the victim of internal politics.

In reality running a web strategy is not particularly suited to either group. IT maybe excellent at rolling out complex systems but they are not suited to developing a friendly users experience or establishing an online brand.

Marketing on the other hand is little better. As Jeffrey Zeldman puts it in his article ‘Let there be web divisions‘:

The web is a conversation. Marketing, by contrast, is a monologue… And then there’s all that messy business with semantic markup, CSS, unobtrusive scripting, card-sorting exercises, HTML run-throughs, involving users in accessibility, and the rest of the skills and experience that don’t fall under Marketing’s purview.

Instead the website should be managed by a single unified team. Again Zeldman sums it up when he writes:

Put them in a division that recognizes that your site is not a bastard of your brochures, nor a natural outgrowth of your group calendar. Let there be web divisions.

2. Managing your website is a full time job

Not only is the website often split between marketing and IT, it is also normally under resourced. Instead of having a dedicated web team, those responsible for the website are often expected to run it alongside their ‘day job’.

Where a web team is in place they are often over stretched. The vast majority of their time is spent on day to day maintenance rather than longer term strategic thinking.

This situation is further exaggerated because the people hired to ‘maintain’ the website are junior members of staff. They do not have the experience or authority to push the website forward.

It is time for organisations to seriously investing in their websites by hiring full time senior web managers to move their web strategies forward.

3. Periodic redesign is not enough

Because corporate websites are under resourced they are often neglected for long periods of time. They slowly become out of date both in terms of content, design and technology.

Eventually the site becomes such an embarrassment that management step in and demand it is sorted. This inevitably leads to a complete redesign at considerable expense.

As I point out in the website owners manual this a flawed approach. It is a waste of money because when the old site is replaced the investment put into it is lost. It is also tough on cash flow with a large expenditure happening every few years.

A better way is continual investment in your site, so allowing it to evolve over time. Not only is this less wasteful it is also better for the users as is pointed out in Cameron Moll’s post ‘Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign‘.

4. Your site cannot appeal to everyone

One of the first questions I ask our clients is ‘who is your target audience?’ I am regularly shocked at the length of the reply. Too often it includes a long and detailed list of diverse people.

Inevitably my next question is which of those many demographic groups are most important. Depressingly the answer is that they are all equally important.

The harsh truth is that if you build a site for everybody it will appeal to nobody. It is important to be extremely focused in your audience and cater your design and content around them.

Does this mean you have to ignore your other users? Not at all. Your site should be accessible by all and should not offend or exclude anybody. However, it does need to have a clearly defined audience that the site is primarily aimed at.

5. Your site is not all about you

Where some website managers want their websites to appeal to everybody, others want it to appeal to themselves and their colleagues.

A surprising number of organisations choose to ignore their users entirely and build their websites entirely around an organisational perspective. This typically manifests itself in inappropriate design that caters to the managing directors personal preferences and content full of internal terminology and jargon.

A website should not be about pandering to the preferences of staff but about meeting the needs of users. Too many designs are rejected because the boss doesn’t like green. Equally too much website copy uses acronyms and terms that are only used internally within an organisation.

6. Design by committee brings death

The ultimate expression of a larger organisations approach to website management is the committee. A committee is formed to tackle the website because internal politics demand everybody has their say and all considerations are taken into account.

To say that all committees are a bad idea is naive and to suggest that a large corporate website could be developed without consultation is fanciful. However when it comes to design, committees are often the kiss of death.

Design is subjective. The way we respond to a design can be influenced by culture, gender, age, childhood experience or even physical conditions (such as colour blindness). What one person considers great design another could hate. This is why it is so important that design decisions are informed by user testing rather than personal experience. Unfortunately this approach is rarely followed when a committee is involved in design decisions.

Instead, design by committee becomes about compromise. Because different committee members have different opinions about the design, they looks for ways to find common ground. One person hates the blue colour palette while another loves it. This leads to design on the fly when the committee instructs the designer to ‘try a different blue’ in the hopes of finding a middle ground. Unfortunately this can only leads to bland design which neither appeals to, or excites, anybody.

7. You’re not getting value from your web team

Whether they have an in-house web team or use an external agency many organisations fail to get the most from their web designers.

Web designers are much more than pixel pushers. They have a wealth of knowledge about the web and how users interact with it. They also understand design techniques including grid systems, white space, colour theory and much more.

It is therefore wasteful to micro manage them by asking for ‘the logo to be made bigger’ or to ‘move that 3 pixels to the left’. By doing so you are reducing their role to that of software operator and wasting the wealth of experience they have.

If you want to get the maximum return from your web team present them with problems not solutions. For example, if you have a site aimed at teenage girls and the designer goes for corporate blue, suggest that the audience might not respond well to the colour. Do not tell them to change it to pink. That way the designer has the freedom to find a solution which might be even better than your choice of pink. You allow them to solve the problem you have presented.

8. A CMS is not a silver bullet

Many of the clients I work with have amazingly unrealistic expectations about content management systems. Those without one think it will solve all of their content woes, while those who do have one moan about it because it hasn’t!

It is certainly true that a content management system can bring a lot of benefits. They…

reduce the technical barriers of adding content,
all more people to edit and add content,
facilitate faster updates,
allow greater control.

However, many content management systems are less flexible than their owners wish. They fail to meet the changing demands of the websites they manage.

Website managers also complain that their CMS is hard to use. However, in many cases this is because those using them have not been given adequate training or are not using it regularly enough.

Finally, a content management system may allow for the easy updating of content, but that does not ensure it will be updated or even that the quality of copy will be maintained. Many content managed websites still have out of date content or are filled with poor quality copy. This is because the internal processes have not been put in place to support the content contributors.

If you are looking to a content management system to solve your site maintenance issues you will be disappointed.

9. You have too much content

Part of the problem with content maintenance on larger corporate websites is that there is too much content in the first place. Most of these sites have ‘evolved’ over years with more and more content being added. At no stage has anybody ever reviewed that content and asked what can be taken away.

Many website managers fill their sites with copy nobody will read. This happens because of:

A fear of missing something – By putting everything online they believe users will be able to find whatever they want. Unfortunately, with so much information being made available, it is hard to find anything.
A fear users will not understand – Whether it is a lack of confidence in their site or in their audience, many website managers feel the need to provide endless instructions to users. Unfortunately, users never read this copy.
A desperate desire to convince - Many website managers are desperate to sell their product or communicate their message. Text becomes bloated with sales copy which actually conveys little valuable information.

Steve Krug in his book ‘Don’t make me think’ encourages website managers to ‘Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left’. This will reduce the noise level of each page and make useful content more prominent.

10. You are wasting money on social networking

I have been encouraged that increasingly website managers are recognising that a web strategy is about more than running a website. They are using tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to increase their reach and engage with new audiences.

However, although they are using these tools, too often they are doing so ineffectively. Corporate twitter accounts and posting sales demonstrations to YouTube miss the essence of social networking.

Social networking is about people engaging with people. Individuals do not want to build relationships with brands or corporations. They want to talk with other people. Too many organisations are throwing millions into facebook apps and viral videos when could be spending that money on engaging with people in a transparent and open away.

Instead of having a corporate twitter account or indeed even a corporate blog, encourage your employees to start tweeting and blogging themselves. Provide guildelines on acceptable behaviour and the tools they need to start engaging directly with the community that surrounds your products and services. This not only demonstrates a commitment to your community but also a human side to your business.

Conclusions

Large organisations do a lot right in the running of their websites. However, they also face some unique challenges that can lead to painful mistakes. Resolving these problems will involve accepting mistakes have been made, overcoming internal politics, and changing the way you control your brand. However, doing so will give you a significant competitive advantage and allow your web strategy to become more effective over the long term.

For more information on how you can make your site more effective read the Website Owners Manual or discuss your site with Paul personally.

There is a followup to this post entitled ‘10 ways to battle site bureaucracy.’ Check it out!

151. Budget

Posted in Classic shows on February 4, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul shares 5 tips for when your website budget gets slashed. We have a review of Dropbox and discuss ways to improve the typography on your site.

Download this show.

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Housekeeping

Two pieces of housekeeping this week.

WCAG2 Video

A couple of weeks ago I did an internal presentation to the guys at Headscape about WCAG2. The idea was to bring them up to speed on the new accessibility guidelines and also to put accessibility back at the centre of our processes.

At the last minute I made the decision to record the session and put the video online. Although the audio is awful (hence not using it in the show) it maybe useful if you have not read up on WCAG2 yet. There is also a transcript if the audio becomes too much.

You can watch my Introduction to WCAG2 here.

Win a copy of ‘A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web’

Mark Boulton has just released a book that covers the underlying principles of all good design. Whether it be online or in print, good design is governed by certain best practices. This book introduces the reader to these principles, including subjects such as…

How to start the design process
Research and ideas
An introduction to typography
The basics of colour theory
The rules of good layout

The book is unsurprisingly beautifully designed. However it is also well written and engaging. I can highly recommend it.

You could go and purchase a copy right now for only £12 (and I would encourage you to do so). Alternatively you could win one of three free copies by entering our twitter competition.

For your chance to win a copy of this inspiring book, twitter your top design tip using the hash tag #designTip. For example your tip might be…

#designTip – If you wish to draw attention to a design element surround it with whitespace.

The closing date for this competition is Friday 27th February, so get your tips in before then.

The winners will be chosen by Mark and we will direct message them shortly after the 27th. To ensure we can do so please subscribe to the Boagworld Twitter feed.

The winners will also be announced over twitter and on the boagworld podcast.

See the excellent tips that have already been submitted here

News and events

IE8 Cometh!

The big news this week is that IE8 has taken one step closer to being officially released by announcing their first release candidate.

According to the IE blog:

The IE8 product is effectively complete and done. Our next step, after listening to feedback from the final testing feedback from the community, is releasing the final product.

Although they do not provide a release date it is fair to say that it will not be long now.

Whenever I talk about IE8 people immediately ask if they can stop supporting IE6. My recent article on graded browser support should make my opinion on that clear.

However, the more important question is are you ready for IE8? Do you know what CSS properties it supports and have you tested your websites in it?

Microsoft provide a handy table of CSS selectors and properties that IE8 and indeed all other versions of IE support.

Once you have looked at that check out the IE8 readiness guide for developers. This has loads of information about IE8 support for CSS, Javascript and various proprietary features.

It also has a small piece of code you can fall back on if you are experiencing serious rendering issues on existing websites. By inserting this code into the head of your HTML document it forces IE8 to render in the same way as IE7. I am sure this will be a useful stop gap measure for website owners unwilling to pay for updates to their sites.

15 Tips for Freelancers Starting Their Own Business

Next up some great advice for web design freelancers. Think Vitamin have published a post entitled ‘15 Tips for Freelancers Starting Their Own Business‘.

In actual fact the advice applies to all freelancers, not just those starting out.

It is a fairly arbitrary list, but it has some good stuff in there. Just a few of what has been included are…

Move Out of Your Back Bedroom
Don’t be Afraid to Pass
Work on your Sales Technique
Learn About Personality Types
Maintain a Verbal/Email Relationship

If you are a freelancer looking for advice I can also highly recommend FreelanceSwitch.com, which is an entire site dedicated entirely to helping freelancers. Check it out.

Facts and Figures

This last week seems to have been a week of facts and figures.

The first figure that caught my eye was that Adobe AIR has been installed 100 million times. That is an impressive figure, even if it is being overstated as some believe.

Moving web applications to the desktop is an area I find particularly exciting. I am not sure it is always necessary. However, platforms like AIR make it scaringly easy, as we discovered when we did a proof of concept recently at Headscape.

The same announcement from Adobe also stated that Flash 10 has a 55% market penetration on Internet connected computers and they expect that number to rise to 80% by Q2 2009. This is an improvement on the adoption speeds of previous versions.

Other facts and figures to appear this week came from the "state of the web" survey carried out by Web Directions South. This is a survey of professional web designers and developers. Some interesting figures pulled out of the survey by Roger Johansson included:

The number of Mac and Windows users are almost equal â€“ both are used by 46.8 % of respondents
As many as 4.7 % use some version of Internet Explorer as their primary browser
Only 29.5 % test their sites in IE 8
Many more use XHTML than HTML
Over 10 % still use tables for layout
Almost 70 % still use presentational markup
Only 69 % create print stylesheets

Not sure these figures are particularly useful, but interesting none the less :)

Sprite Optimization

Finally today, I
would like to draw your attention to an interesting post by Dave Shea on ‘Sprite Optimisation‘.

Let me briefly explain what CSS sprites are in case you are not aware. Let’s say you have a button with three states – unvisited, visited and hover. Instead of having one image for each state of button you can use a single image containing all three states. You then use CSS to position the image in such a way that it only shows the current state.

In fact Dave Shea wrote an excellent article on ‘CSS sprites‘ back in 2004.

Dave’s new post demonstrates that this technique is now being taken to the extreme with sites like Amazon, Google and Apple cramming large numbers of sprites into a single image.

Whether this is entirely necessary for the types of sites most of us are involved in is debatable. The technique also has some drawbacks on devices such as the iPhone, where performance can be effected.

That said, it is a way of substantially reducing the number of calls to the server so causing pages to load faster.

If you are suffering from performance problems or have a project that requires lightning download then check out Dave’s post and also a CSS sprite implementation guide he refers to.

Feature: 5 options when website budgets get slashed

Your site is in desperate need of a redesign, content is out of date and the technology is archaic. Unfortunately times are tight and your budget has been cut. What do you do? Read More

Listeners feedback:

I am very conscious that I have not been encouraging listener contributions and that is slack of me. This is a part of the show I really want to grow. As I have said before, Boagworld is about the community, not just my personal opinion.

With that in mind you can contribute in three ways…

Email – I cannot always respond personally but I read everyone.
Phone – You can either Skype ‘boagworldshow’ or call 020 8133 5122 and leave a message.
Forum – I often take questions from the forum, so make sure you join that too and get involved.

Talking of the forum, both of this week’s listener contributions come from there.

Listener Review of DropBox

From time to time we do listener reviews on the show and there is a section of the forum dedicated to reviews.

This week I have selected a review from the forum by Dave Redfern. He reviews DropBox, which although not strictly a web design tool will be useful to all.

Dave writes:

I came across dropbox last month thanks to the good people over at the mac roundtable podcast. Because i work on several computers from windows and mac machines in the same house, windows machines at work and at uni i am paranoid about making sure my files follow me around.

The basic concept of getdropbox.com is you install the software on each computer you have, then any files you wish to keep synced between them all you drop in this folder. If it is a public machine you can still access your files from their website although it is a little more clunky. You don’t need to set it to upload changes at a certain time or activate it, the software will automatically sync the folders whenever anything is changed.

A nice feature is within the dropbox folder there is a public folder and anything put in here can be accessed by anyone via a website link. the get the link all you need to do is right click on the file and select ‘copy link address’ and then paste it where ever you need. it is great for sending things to friends or showing clients screenshots of mock ups.

Preferences are very limited to limiting the bandwidth used at anyone time and changing the foler (although when i tried this feature i kept crashing my finder!) but simple is good sometimes.

It is free to sign up and you get 2gb of webspace free. you can upgrade to 50gb for $10/month or $100 for the year which seems reasonable.

the software is available for mac, windows and linux so perfect for anyone.

I will give it 3.5/5 at the moment. there is still some work to do on the software but a great start and very promising.

Personally I think 3.5/5 is a bit harsh but I know what he means. I love dropbox and have just paid for the 50gb account, but the web interface could do with some improvement. Also a native iPhone application would be nice.

That said we use it loads at Headscape to share files privately. It is perfect for that and online backup (including versioning) and I would highly recommend it to everyone.

Font Embedding on the Web

There is an interesting thread on the forum about font embedding that I also wanted to mention. Started by Dven he writes:

It’s a pretty popular subject but wanted to raise this to hear what your thoughts are on it all.

Basically a designer in our office found this link: http://www.fontburner.com. Thought that it be a good idea to maybe use in the near future. Now personally, I’m against embedding non-standard web fonts in this way.

The designer’s reaction. "its pretty much the way the design on web is going – limitations in type have always been a problem – not anymore. Its not the best solution, but pretty soon there will be a better one."

Be good to hear your thoughts?

After checking out Font Burner I discovered that it was a quick and easy way of adding sIFR to your site. We have talked about sIFR before on the show. It is a technique that uses flash to replace HTML text with your desired font.

I was pretty impressed by FontBurner but as Laura said…

It’s not the most semantic way to embed different fonts, as it requires <div class="font-name">text</div> if you want to change anything but <h1>.

Later in the thread Dvan went on to say…

These types of solutions are always prone to not working somewhere along the line. Guess I am kind of a very semantic guy and prefer to do things the ‘standard’ way.

Personally I do not feel that strongly. I think techniques like these are sometimes necessary to overcome browser limitations. That said, I do share his concern about these things not always being very reliable.

I actually rarely use sIFR. My preference is to make better use of font-stacks. These can be very powerful if used well. It is basically another variation on progressive enhancement. If the user has the nice font they get it, but if they don’t they get a substitute.

The reason most designers resort to sIFR is because the client insists on a
particular font. I would prefer to educate the client than resort to sIFR. By educating them over this issue you are laying the ground work for conversations about graded browser support and various other progressive enhancement issues.

On the subject of web typography, let me leaving you with a smashing magazine post that has come out this week – 50 Useful Design Tools for Beautiful Web Typography.

Tips for a transformed twitter

Posted in Marketing on February 3, 2009 by Paul Boag

Paul Carter from New York writes:

Paul, I notice that you have been lamenting a lot on twitter about it becoming a marketing tool. Is that really wrong? Shouldn’t we be embracing and using it?

I sent my first twitter in November of 2006, only 7 months after the services launch. For me it was a way to keep in touch with new friends I had made at the Refresh 06 conference. It was less intrusive than instant messaging and less formal than email. I quickly became hooked.

For the longest time it was the tool of geeks. My friends laughed at me as I sent tweets from the pub, my family stared blankly as I explained the service. However, that has all changed now.

Like Facebook before it Twitter is everywhere at the moment. It was even recently discussed by Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross on the BBC in front of 4 million viewers. It has become mainstream and increasingly it is being used as a marketing tool. There is no going back.

However, Paul is right. I am wrong to lament what Twitter once was and should embrace it as a tool I can use. Nevertheless like everybody, I need to be careful how I use it. I do not believe Twitter users will allow the tool to be reduced to a broadcast mechanism for pimping the latest blog post or special offer.

So how am I choosing to use Twitter?

I guess the first thing to say is that I am not a Twitter success story. Sure I have nearly 4000 people following me but that pale into insignificance when compared to others. That said, Twitter is turning into a third string of my online presence, alongside this blog and podcast.

With that in mind let me share with you a few tips that have helped me better utilise this interesting new tool.

1. Above all, keep it personal

Although twitterers like CNN breaking news have been very successful, generally I feel corporate twitter accounts are a mistake.

In my opinion twitter is about person to person communication and not a broadcast tool for faceless corporations. To use it in that way is to miss the potential of twitter.

Does that mean you cannot have a twitter account for your organisation? Not at all. For example if Vitaly Friedman created a twitter account you might not recognise the name. However, if he used the name SmashingMag you are more likely to follow because you know the Smashing Magazine website.

It is not the name that matters so much as the tone of posts. In my opinion your tweets should be more than an endless string of press releases and links. It should include personal content and a dialogue with followers.

This is important because it enables you to make a connection with your users. An open and honest relationship with users is very powerful. It builds trust, loyalty and engagement. It encourages repeat traffic and word of mouth recommendation.

2. Learn from others

I have learnt a lot about Twittering just by reading the tweets of those I admire. Merlin Mann for example injects a lot of humour into his posts and his followers really respond to that. Darren Rowse on the other hand strikes a good place between recommending content others have written with promoting his own posts.

As well as examining the style of others you can also examine statistics. Use a tool like TweetStats.com to examine how often others tweet and how often they reply to their followers. All of this helps to build up a picture of what makes a successful twitterer.

There are also a growing number of great sites which give advice on how to get the most out of twitter. One of my personal favourites is TwiTip that covers subjects such as “The Merit of Twitter Competitions” and “How To Get Unfollowed On Twitter“.

3. Get a good desktop client

Without a shadow of doubt the most powerful twitter client currently available is TweetDeck. This air application not only runs on Windows, Mac and Lynx but also provides a range of superb tools for managing your life on Twitter.

With TweetDeck you can create groups, filter tweets, monitor certain subjects as well as tweet, reply and retweet posts.

In fact it is so powerful that it can be somewhat intimidating at first. Don’t let that put you off. Check out this short tutorial into TweetDeck’s core features and you will be up and running in no time.

4. Use twitter on the road

If your twitter account is going to be personal as well as professional then you will almost certainly want to use it on the road. One option is to simply use Twitters mobile website. However if you are fortunate enough to have an iPhone then there is a wealth of Twitter clients available to you.

I think I have paid for and tried almost every twitter client on the Iphone, but the winner hands down is Tweetie.

I love Tweetie. It has a clean, easy to use interface, and yet is packed with powerful features including the ability to:

Handle multiple twitter accounts.
Navigate reply chains.
View twitter trends and perform custom searches.
Access complete user profiles.

In many ways it is even better than TweetDeck because it has much of TweetDeck’s power, but in a much cleaner interface. If only they did a desktop application!

5. Tracking the results

Although I have already mentioned TweetStats, that is just the tip of the statistical iceberg.

There are an ever growing number of tools you can use to track your activity on twitter. However, the ones that really interest me are those that track click throughs. What I really want to know is if I mention a link in twitter, how many people click through.

If the link is one on my own sites I could use Google Analytics using their URL tagging tool. However, this is somewhat fiddly and only applies if I am linking to my own site. What is more these URLs can get long, which is a problem when limited to 140 characters.

Fortunately there is a tool called TwitterBurner which solves these problems. It shortens the URL and tracks all click throughs even to sites you do not run yourself. Best of all it is now supported from directly within TweetDeck (although not Tweetie unfortunately).

6. Follow as well as be followed

Always remember that Twitter is a two way conversation. A big part of successful twittering is about replying to those who tweet you.

Twitter is also not just about who follows you. It is also about who you follow. One service that I find particularly useful is Mr Tweet.

Mr Tweet will provides two type of information.

First it suggests people you might want to consider following because they fall within your broad network (people who are followed by your friends).
Second it suggests those from your list of followers who you should follow back.

For each of these people it provides various stats including:

The number of followers they have
The chance of them replying to you
How often they update

This is a great way of extending your network of contacts and potentially increasing the chance of your tweets being retweeted. Its also a great way of meeting new people!

7. Integrate whenever possible

If you are intending to use Twitter for anything other than personal use it needs to be incorporated into the rest of your web strategy. That means it needs to linkup with your other online activity including your website and other social networks.

There are no shortage of tools that help you do this from the basic twitter widget to a tool for sending your tweets to facebook.

One tool that particularly caught my attention is called TwitterFeed. It posts content from an RSS feed to Twitter which is a useful way of updating your followers about new posts.

However, use any tool that automatically posts to Twitter with caution. It can easily become annoying if used too much. Also it lacks the friendliness of a personal post.

8. Don’t over think it

Of course the problem with all these tools, statistics and analysis is that it can suck the spontaneity and personality from your tweets.

Although some of those late night drunken tweets are best gone, you want to avoid your tweets becoming too sterile.

Let me explain what I mean. I am naturally a fairly good public speaker. However, once I was sent to a public speaking workshop. They taught me all the techniques you should use to be exceptional. However, instead of it improving my skills it made me so amazingly self conscious that I was paralysed. I was over analysing what I was doing.

The danger is we do the same with Twitter. Sure, Twitter can be used as a marketing tool but that doesn’t mean it cannot be fun too. Don’t let articles like this suck the joy out of twittering!